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You're sitting on his kitchen counter in one of his shirts and nothing else. The white linen one, the soft one, the one he wore to dinner three weeks ago and left here on the back of the bathroom door. Your bare legs rest crossed at the ankles, and you have toast in one hand and coffee in the other. 

May sun spills through the eastern windows of his apartment in long gold panels, lighting up the cut peonies on the island, lighting up the smooth marble, lighting up, especially, the sweat at Valarr's collarbones.

You watch him. You take your time about it, too. Your eyes drag—deliberately, calculated, unsubtle—from the wet hair down to the line of his throat, across the soaked t-shirt where it sticks to him. Your attention lingers on the lean cut of his torso under the cotton, down to the shorts, finally to his bare feet on the dark wood floor. You make sure he sees you doing it. 

You bring your eyes back up to his, and you raise one eyebrow, calmly, as if you’re reviewing a piece of property.

Valarr’s jaw ticks once, the brown eye darker by half a shade than it was a minute ago.

"Love."

"Yes?"

"I'm going to shower," he informs you.

You take a sip of your coffee. "Are you?"

"I am, yeah," he says, half a laugh in it, drinking you in with that fascinated focus that's become his default in your presence. "I'm—I'm fairly gross, I just got off the rower and the trainer was a sadist this morning. I won't subject you to—"

You crook two fingers at him.

It's a small gesture. Two fingers, lifted, curled. Just once. Come here.

Valarr stops talking.

He stops talking with the visible suddenness of a man whose train of thought has just been derailed by the simplest possible signal. Your two fingers, one small motion, the kind of summoning a woman might do to a dog she's fond of. You watch him do exactly what you knew he would do, which is start across the kitchen toward you without thinking about it.

"You don't actually want to—" he begins.

You sigh. "Valarr."

"—I really am sweaty, love, give me five minutes—"

"Valarr."

He's at the counter. His hands land on your bare knees, automatic, because your knees are at the level of his hands and because he can’t stand near you and not touch you. The contact is hot and slightly damp, not unpleasant, and you watch him register the heat of his palms on you and not pull them back.

"Yes, love?" 

Your eyes narrow. "Come here."

His brows wrinkles a little. "I am here."

"Closer."

He laughs. Soft. A little wrecked already, and you've barely started. He steps in between your knees, his hands sliding up your thighs an inch and stopping with that intentional, leashed restraint that’s the central tic of his physical presence. The way he always pauses an inch before he means to land, the calibration he’s constantly performing in the millisecond before he touches you.

Valarr leans down and kisses you.

It's a careful kiss. It's a good morning, sweet girl kiss. Closed-mouthed, warm, his hand coming up to cup your jaw, his thumb stroking once along your cheekbone. He tastes like salt, like the espresso he downed before he left for the gym, like the mint in his pre-workout gum. His nose nudges yours, and Valarr makes a small contented sound in his throat that’s so unbearably boyish that for half a second you almost let him have his shower.

Almost.

You set the coffee down beside you, and set the toast down right after. You free both your hands and you put one of them in Valarr’s damp hair—high, at the crown, where the sweat is—and you fist your fingers in it, and you pull, just enough.

He makes a sound.

It's a small thing, coming out of him like he didn't know he was going to make it at all. A short involuntary catch in his throat—half a groan, half a question—and you feel Valarr’s whole body go still against you. Feel his hand at your jaw arrest, feel the breath leave him and not come back.

You growl.

You don't mean to. It comes out of your throat low and warning and entirely without your permission. A thin rough sound at the back of your tongue, the kind of noise something with teeth makes when it's decided what it wants, and Valarr stops moving altogether.

He stops kissing you, stops breathing. He stops, full stop, his mouth a half-inch from yours, his hand cradling your jaw. The towel still hangs from his neck, his pupils dilating in real time so fast you can watch the brown one go almost black, the blue one going luminous.

"Love," he breathes hotly.

You don't answer.

You hook your bare legs around the back of his thighs, and you pull him forward into you. Yank him in until his hips are pressed against the edge of the counter and against the inside of your thighs. Until the soaked cotton of his t-shirt is against the linen of his shirt you're wearing, and you can feel the heat of him through everything. The post-workout furnace of his body, the damp cling of sweat-warmed cotton against your bare skin.

"You said you needed to shower," you say mildly.

Valarr swallows. "I did say that."

"Do you?" you question, deceptively mildly.

"I—I think I—love."

You're already pulling at the hem of the t-shirt.

You drag it up slowly. You make Valarr lift his arms for you, and he does it instantly, his eyes locked on your face, and the wet cotton peels off him with that particular reluctance damp cotton has. Sticking, releasing, sticking. Until you've got it bunched at his shoulders and then over his head and then balled in your fist and then dropped, wet, to the marble counter beside the toast, where it lands with a small slap that neither of you registers.

He is. He is—

You knew. You've known what Valarr looks like under the t-shirt for three months now.

You’ve catalogued every line of him, watched him strip down in the dim of his bedroom, and traced your hands over him in the dark. You have, several times, watched him swim laps in the building's pool while pretending to read by the glass. 

You know what he looks like. But you haven't ever seen him in this light before.

The eastern sun is fully on him, illuminating him fully, painting him golden. 

He’s the long, lean, particular shape of a man who works out with the discipline of someone who has time and money to consider his body a project. Not bulky, never bulky, that wouldn't suit him, but cut. 

Every line of his body is beautiful and deliberate. The cut of his hipbones above the waistband of the shorts, the smooth, lean stomach with that faint dark and white trail of hair below his navel you've licked twice now. The lift of his chest, where his breath is going uneven, and the long, elegant lines of his toned arms.

There’s sweat in the hollow of his throat. Sweat gathers at his sternum, too, gathers and trails down. There’s a small mole low on his ribs that you’ve kissed three times in three months, and that catches the light now in a way that makes you want to sink your teeth into him.

He’s beautiful. Absurdly beautiful. Valarr is the kind of beautiful that’s been worshipped his whole life and has therefore developed no real defence against being wanted. 

You can see it in his face. In the slight parting of his mouth, in the held quality of his breathing. The way Valarr stares at you like you’ve just announced war against him.

Nobody has ever wanted him quite like this before. Not for his wealth or name, or pretty boy looks, but in an older way, the animal way.

You put both hands on him.

You start at the jut of his collarbones. Both palms flat on the slick of him. You drag them down leisurely over the planes of his chest, your thumbs grazing the small dark points of his nipples because you can’t help yourself and because he makes another small sound when you do. Ragged, swallowed; then over the cut of his ribs, the flat of his toned stomach, the line of his sides where his obliques narrow into his hips; down to the waistband of the shorts, where you stop, where you let your fingers hook into the elastic for one held second.

He’s shaking faintly under your hands.

"Love," he rasps again, like it’s the only word left available to him.

"Shhh."

You lean forward.

You put your mouth on his throat.

Right where the sweat gathers. Right at the hollow at the base of Valarr’s throat, where you can taste salt and the dark woody thing that’s his soap and underneath both of those, the warmer animal smell that is just him, just Valarr. The thing you've known by scent since the third week of knowing him by name. 

You suck. You set your teeth, very lightly, against the tendon at the side of his neck, and you suck until the skin there gives a little. Until you feel the heat rise to the surface of his skin, until you feel his pulse pound against your tongue. His hands come up and land hard on your hips, fingers digging in, ungoverned.

Valarr groans.

No perfect control in that sound.

It comes out of him into your hair, your throat, the bare line of your shoulder where the linen has slipped. It’s the sound of a man whose composure has finally—finally, after three months of every careful, courteous can I, sweet girl, may I, my love—slipped its leash entirely.

His hands tighten on your hips. He goes hard against you instantly. You feel it happen through the thin shorts, against the inside of your thigh where you've pulled him in between your legs. The heat of it shoots up your spine and turns your vision white at the edges.

"Oh," he breathes against your hair. "Oh, fuck."

You keep your mouth at his throat, mouth twitching with satisfaction. You drag your teeth. You suck a second mark, lower this time, near the cut of his collarbone, and feel his hips push forward involuntarily against yours. Then jerk back as he tries to remember himself, tries to remember he's gross and sweaty and was going to shower.

You don't let him remember.

You hook your legs harder around the back of his thighs, rolling your hips against his. Once. Slow and hard. You make sure Valarr feels the line of you against him through the thin linen of his shirt, through the thin cotton of his shorts and through the heat of his own ridiculous body. His hand at your hip slides up your back, under the hem of the shirt, finds the bare skin there, and his fingers spread, and he holds. Possessive, dazed, cradling you close.

You pull back enough to look at him.

His face. Gone soft, completely glazed. Those mismatched eyes are blown, his mouth parted slightly. His hair is pushed back from his forehead where you've fisted it, his pulse going at his throat so visibly you can count it. 

Valarr’s gazing at you the way he looks at you across rooms, the way he looks at you when you laugh at something he said, the way he looks at you when you walk in late to a dinner he’s set up. That immortalising look, the one where he’s making a permanent record of you.

Except now there’s no polish on it. None. The look is stripped down to the thing underneath, which is hunger, which is wonder, the dazed, unguarded face of a man who’s not, in twenty-six years of being adored, ever been taken.

You rake your nails down his chest.

Just enough to leave four faint pink lines that will pink up red within a minute, that he’ll notice in the shower later and trace with his fingers when he looks at himself in the mirror. That will make him hard again four hours from now in some meeting he’ll remember nothing of.

"My love," he says softly. "Christ, what—what are you —"

"Need you," you rasp. “Need you right now, Val.”

It comes out of you low, rough, without softness. Not I'd like, or will you, or any of the carefully negotiated phrasings you’ve used with Valarr for three months, because that’s the register he speaks in. You’ve dropped the register. 

You’re looking at him with your eyes gone dark and your mouth wet from his throat, the linen of his shirt slipping off your shoulder, and you have told him exactly what you require.

He stares at you.

The brown eye is so dark now you can't see the iris anymore, the blue one lit from within. He’s breathing through his mouth in shallow pulls, and his hands have not let go of your hips. You can feel him, hard, throbbing, against the inside of your thigh, and you watch the last of his composure go.

You watch it. You watch the moment.

It’s extraordinary.

Nothing slips or cracks. He's too dignified. It’s a handing-over. Three months of careful patient attentive I won't presume, love, and you’ve asked him for one thing in two words. He has, without taking his eyes off your face, simply given you the leash he’s been holding on to himself the entire time, set it down at your feet.

"Whatever you want," he says.

His voice has gone low and ragged. Half-octave under his usual register. Reverent.

"Whatever you want, sweet girl. Whatever you want. I'll—anything. Tell me."

You lean forward. You put your mouth to his ear. You feel the shiver that goes through him when you do.

"Counter," you murmur, lips brushing against heated skin. "Here. Now."

"But—"

"Now, Valarr."

"Yes, yes."

You barely hear it. He's nodding into your hair. His hand is sliding down the back of your thigh and lifting you slightly and pulling you to the very edge of the counter, the marble cool under the back of your thighs and Valarr’s hand hot under them. 

His other hand comes up, going into your hair, grabbing a fistful at the nape of your neck. Then his mouth comes back to yours, and this time he’s not polite. There’s nothing careful about this at all. The kiss is open and wet, a little desperate, and it tastes like salt and espresso. Valarr’s making small, devastated sounds into your mouth that he doesn't seem aware of, and his hips roll forward against yours without his permission. 

He doesn’t pull them back this time, hasn't apologised, hasn't asked.

You bite his lower lip. Lightly. He groans and you swallow the sound. 

"Sweet girl."

You let out a small, pleased hum at the hungry groan in his voice.

"Sweet girl,” he says again, pecking you, then again, one hand at your jaw. "I—what are you—"

"You said anything?"

He murmurs against your lips, "Anything."

"Then stop talking."

He nods with a low groan, his forehead dropping to yours. His hand tightens in your hair. His other hand has come up under the hem of his shirt and slides up the bare skin of your back, splayed hot against your spine.

You roll your hips against his again. Harder, this time. His whole body shudders.

"Oh."

You peck the corner of his mouth. "Shh."

"You can’t,” he whispers, ragged, “you can't do that—"

"I can."

"—you can't, you'll—"

"Valarr."

His breath hitches. "Yes?"

"Be a good boy."

The sound that comes out of him is going to live in your head for the rest of your life.

You smile.

You bring his face up to yours. You make him look at you. He’s looking at you like you’re a miracle he gets to claim for himself, and you look back at him, letting him see your face. You let him see the wolf in you that you’ve been carefully keeping behind glass since he met you, let him see the thing he’s been suspecting was in there and not been allowed to see until now.

His mouth parts.

"Where," he says quietly, wrecked. "Where have you been all my life?"

You smile gently, dragging your thumb across his swollen lower lip.

"Right here, pretty thing," you say lovingly.

A groan rumbles in his throat. "Pretty thing," he repeats, dazed. 

Your mouth curves, and you kiss the corner of his mouth again, cradling his cheek. "Mm."

Valarr laughs. Silky, ruined. He turns his face into your hand and kisses your palm, then your wrist and then the inside of your forearm. His eyes, when they come back to your face, are dazed and adoring in a way that’s bordering, you realise distantly, on something more dangerous than adoration. 

He drops to his knees. He kneels there, on the dark wood floor, and looks up at you.

For one suspended second, Valarr doesn't move. His hands are at your knees, splayed wide, and he’s on the floor of his own kitchen, gazing up at you. He is, you realise after a beat, waiting.

He’s waiting for you to tell him what you want from him.

Three months of carefully negotiated can I, sweet girl, may I touch you here, may I taste you, will you let me, and you’ve stripped that out of him in eight minutes flat. He’s on his knees, bare-chested, sweat-slick, the early sun gilding the long lean lines of him.

You spread your legs. Just enough. You shift your weight onto the marble and let your knees fall a fraction wider, watching Valarr’s eyes drop to where the linen of his shirt has ridden up. His breath leaves him in one long, painstaking exhale through his nose.

"Love," he breathes. “Anything for you. Just ask.”

You say nothing for a full minute. "Then eat, Valarr."

The sound he makes goes through you like a struck bell.

He surges forward. There’s no other word for it. Doesn't crawl, doesn't lean, he surges, both hands pushing your knees wider as he comes, his mouth opening against the bare inside of your thigh first. High, where you’re softest, and biting, not hard, just enough to make you arch off the marble. Just enough to leave a small crescent he’ll be staring at later in the bathroom mirror like evidence.

Then his mouth is on you.

A sound you don’t recognise slips past your clenched teeth. 

It comes out of your throat broken and surprised, unbearably loud in his quiet kitchen, the morning sun slanting across both of you, and Valarr—who’s been so unfailingly polite for three months, who’s asked permission for every step, and eaten you out before with that slow reverence—Valarr eats you now like a man who’s been waiting his entire life for someone to tell him he can do this.

His hands drag across your body, devouring each curve. One comes up under the linen shirt, spreading hot and wide across the small of your back, anchoring you, pulling you to the absolute edge of the counter. 

The other hooks under your thigh and lifts, draping your leg over his shoulder, the bare back of your knee against the slick, damp skin of him. Valarr’s hand grips your other thigh hard enough that you'll have small fingertip bruises by lunchtime, four neat ovals in a row on the inside.

And his mouth. His mouth. He’s using his teeth in a way he hasn't before. Lightly, with calculation. He’s using his tongue with the same focused accuracy he’s always used it, but he’s shed the carefulness; he’s shed the I won't presume, he’s going at you with the dazed greed of a man who wanted this for a long, long time.

You fist your hand in his hair.

You pull. Hard. You drag his face deeper into you because you can’t help yourself. 

Because the sun is full on both of you and the marble is cold under your thighs, his hair damp under your hand, and his mouth is exactly where you need it, and Valarr moans into you, the sound vibrating against you. His hand on your thigh tightens, and his shoulder presses harder under your knee, making him go at you with renewed focus, as if the pull of your hand in his hair were an instruction he;s just gratefully received.

You come embarrassingly fast.

With one hand fisted in his damp hair and one hand braced flat behind you on the marble. Your back arches, your toes curling, the linen of his shirt sliding off one shoulder, your thighs clamping around his head, and Valarr’s hands grip you through it, holding you exactly where he wants you while you go to pieces against his mouth. He doesn't stop. Doesn't slow. He keeps going through it, soft and persistent, his mouth gentling but not lifting, his tongue dragging through the aftermath of your release with the same dazed, reverent focus.

"Valarr—"

He hums against you, and your hand spasms in his hair.

"Valarr."

He lifts his head a fraction, mouth wet, chin wet too. The white streak at his temple is plastered with sweat, and the dark of his hair is sticking up in places where you’ve been pulling, and his eyes, when they meet yours, are destroyed.

He licks his lower lip.

"More," he states, voice low. “I want more. All of you, sweet girl. Let me taste you. More.”

It's barely a word. More so, a request, a question, and a small wrecked plea rolled into one. You watch Valarr’s face, and you feel—sharply, delightedly, with a clean cold satisfaction in the centre of your chest—that you have him.

That you’ve just had him in a way you haven’t had him before. 

Those three months of polished, restrained worship have just been redrawn, definitively, in your favour.

You drag your thumb across his wet lower lip, holding his eyes. You let him see you.

"Up," you tell him softly.

"But I’m not done—"

"Up."

Valarr rises. Like a man who’s forgotten how legs work and is figuring it out in real time, sluggish, stupefied, his hands sliding up the backs of your thighs as he comes, his mouth coming up to yours. He’s kissing you before he’s fully standing, his mouth open against yours, and you taste yourself on him. Sharp and bright and warm. You make a low sound of approval in your throat, biting his lower lip, hard enough to leave a mark, and he whimpers into your mouth.

Oh, that sound.

That sound is going to live in your head until you die. 

A beautiful, rasping sound of a man who hasn’t known he was capable of producing that sound until a moment ago. Your hand fists tighter in his hair in reward, and you yank his head back. Your mouth goes to Valarr’s throat where you’ve already marked him once, but you bite him there a second time, harder now, dragging your teeth across the place his pulse is pounding, sucking until you taste salt and the faint copper-edge of where you've broken a capillary, and Valarr—

Valarr's hips jerk forward against yours.

Once. Twice. Hard. Involuntary.

You feel him through the thin gym shorts, against the bare wet of you on the very edge of the counter, and the heat of him is shocking. His gasping breath breaks against your hair in ragged little catches, so you set your teeth into the muscle at the side of his neck and bite. 

Hard, unapologetically, the way you would bite into something you intended to keep, and Valarr makes a sound you haven’t heard from him before in your life, low and shocked and delightfully animal. His hips jerk forward one more time and stop, his whole body going rigid against you, his hands clamping on your hips, his forehead dropping hard to your shoulder, and you feel him—

You feel him come.

In his shorts. Through his shorts. Against the inside of your thigh, the bare wet of you, the marble counter underneath. You feel the pulse of it through the thin cotton, and you feel the heat of it bloom against you. He’s shaking, properly shaking, his fingers digging into your hip. Valarr’s mouth slacks open against your collarbone, making small ragged pained sounds into your skin.

You go very still.

You watch his face, eyes wide. His face angles into your throat and stays there, hidden, his shoulders shaking finely under your hands.

You feel the wet heat of him soak through the cotton against your inner thigh, slow and too warm and absurdly intimate, and you understand—with a low, bright pleasure that has nothing to do with reciprocation—that you’ve just made Valarr Targaryen come in his pants in his own kitchen on a Tuesday morning by biting his neck.

He’s gone, distinctly, several shades pinker.

"Fuck," he chokes out, faintly, into your throat. "Oh, fuck."

Your mouth curves into a pleased, feline smile.

You already hear the apology forming on his tongue when he whispers, "I didn't mean—"

"Look at me," you drawl.

"I—"

"Look at me, Val."

He lifts his head.

His face is wrecked, cracked open by pleasure. His mouth gapes, his perfect hair destroyed. His pupils are blown so wide his eyes are nearly black, both of them, even the blue one, and there’s colour high on his cheekbones and the hollow of his throat is heaving. There’s a fresh red bruise blooming under the line of his jaw where you’ve just sucked it into being, and he’s looking at you, just looking like you’ve cracked something open in him. 

He swallows.

"I—" His voice is ruined, quiet, faintly embarrassed. "I'm sorry, that has—that hasn’t happened to me since I was—"

You stroke your thumb up his jaw. "It’s alright. I liked it."

"—fifteen, love, I—" 

"Valarr, I liked it," you tell him. "I like making you fall apart just as much as you enjoys doing the same to me."

His eyes sharpen, focusing on your face. "You do?"

You drag your hand down his chest in response, watching his eyes track the path of your hand.

You feel him still hard against you—still hard, even through what just happened, the impossibility and the inevitability of him, twenty-six years old and beautiful and on a strict regimen, his body already rallying—and you drag your fingers down across his stomach. Down to the soaked waistband of the shorts, and you slip two fingers into the waistband, and you tug playfully.

"Off."

"Are you sure?" he croaks.

"Take them off."

He nods, fumbling with the drawstring. His hands are shaking—actually shaking, you can see them, his fingers can't manage the knot at first—and you watch him laugh once, breathless, embarrassed, and it makes you smile at him fondly. His own expression softens further when he catches you looking at him like that, some tension melting from his shoulder blades. 

The knot finally loosens, and he pushes the shorts down, stepping out of them. He kicks them aside, naked and sweat-streaked. Wet at the front of his thighs where he spilt moments ago, but still hard, gloriously, almost insolently, his cock heavy and flushed dark against the cut of his hip. 

You look at him.

You take your time looking at him.

He stands there in his own kitchen and lets you. Valarr’s hands hang at his sides. His face is naked in a way that pricks inside your chest, so you take your time with him. 

You let your eyes drag inch at a time. Over the planes of his chest, the four pink lines down his sternum where you scratched him five minutes ago, the two darkening bruises at his throat, the smoothness of his stomach, the trail of hair below his navel. You watch him bear your hungry examination. Watch him stand there and let you look, watch a small, almost-shy smile pull at the corner of his mouth.

"Sweet girl," he says quietly.

You tilt your head. 

"You're—"

"Hush, pretty thing," you say instead, still drinking him in. 

You reach down between your own thighs.

You don't break eye contact. You drag two fingers through the wet mess of you—your own, his, the slick of both of you mixed at the edge of the marble where his shorts had pressed against you—and you bring your fingers up between you, glistening, and see his face change.

"Oh."

"Open your mouth, Valarr," you instruct gently. 

He opens.

He opens with the same dazed, automatic obedience he’s been giving you for the last fifteen minutes.

His head tilting back a fraction, his lips parting, his eyes locked on your face, and you slide your two wet fingers into his mouth, and you push—past his teeth, past his tongue, two knuckles deep—and Valarr's eyes flutter half-shut. 

He makes a tiny, muffled sound around your fingers and his hands come up to brace on the counter on either side of your hips. His tongue moves against your fingers, sucking at them, lapping up the wet of himself off your skin with such immediate pleasure that something hot and possessive unfurls in your chest.

You push your fingers a fraction deeper. He takes them. Valarr’s throat works around the heel of your hand. He keeps his eyes on yours.

You pull your fingers out slowly, dragging the wetness across his lower lip, leaving a slick smear.

He makes a small, ruined sound.

"You taste yourself, pretty thing?" you ask quietly. 

"Yes," he answers, breathless, eyes hooded.

He leans forward and kisses you.

He kisses you with his mouth still wet from your fingers and your wet still on his tongue, and he kisses you the way he ate you ten seconds before. Open, urgent, no carefulness anywhere in him. You taste him in your own mouth, salt and bright and warm and slightly bitter and him, and his hands have come up off the counter and gripped your hips again, fingers digging in. You feel him roll his hips forward against the bare wetness of your core and groan into your mouth.

He’s so hard. Again. Still. His cock is hot and heavy against the inside of your thigh, and there’s wetness against your skin, and you don't know whose anymore. Valarr’s mouth moves against yours, slick and fully open-mouthed. 

You break the kiss after another moment. You hold his face in both your hands.

"Harder," you order huskily. 

He groans against your lips. "My sweet girl."

"Harder, Val."

He nods. He kisses you harder. His teeth catch your lower lip, and he sucks at it, tentative, and then—when you make a hungry, pleased sound into his mouth—bolder, biting, the carefulness sliding off him in real time as he learns that you want this. That you’ve wanted this for a while. That the ferocity he’s been keeping behind glass for three months because he was afraid of frightening you was, in fact, the thing you were waiting for.

You drag your hand down between you. You wrap his length in your fist.

Valarr chokes.

"Shhh." 

You kiss his cheek, stroking him, once, slow, grip tight. He’s hot and slick at the head from his own coming, from his own anticipation. Valarr shudders against you, his forehead dropping to your collarbone. His hand fists in the linen of his shirt at your back.

"You can't,” he groans, barely audible, “I'll come again, I'll—"

"You will," you agree softly, kissing the shell of his ear. 

He loosens a groan. "Love."

"You will, pretty thing,” you say again, thumb rubbing over the slit of his cock. “As many times as I want."

He makes a sound, a ragged half-groan, and you smile against the side of his head, kissing the spot where his white streak meets his temple and you feel him shudder under your mouth.

You keep stroking him. Just at the edge of unbearable. You watch Valarr’s face turn into your shoulder, his hips pushing forward into your hand. You watch the discipline of him—the man who deadlifts at five in the morning, who runs his portfolio with surgical precision, who has never not been in control of a room—fall to absolute pieces against the linen of his own shirt on your shoulder.

"Show me," you murmur into his hair.

"Mm?"

"Show me, Valarr," you whisper into his ear.

Valarr ruts into your fist, a hot, wet pant burning the hollow of your throat, "Show you what, sweet girl?” he croaks. “I—anything, for you—"

You hum, twisting your wrist as you exhale, "Show me your strength."

He stills.

You feel it. He stills against you, his face still pressed to your shoulder, his cock heavy and pulsing obscenly in your hand, his hands locked at the small of your back. You can hear him breathing. Can hear the pulse in his throat against your shoulder. 

You feel him register the words, feel him understand them, exactly.

"You're a dragon, aren't you?" you wonder idly. “My golden, beautiful dragon.”

"—yes." 

No hesitation. 

"Then claim me."

He lifts his head.

The stupified, shocked compliance of the last fifteen minutes is gone. 

What’s in its place is something you haven’t seen on Valarr's face yet. He’s not the polished, smiling, immaculate boy who brought you peonies and asked permission to kiss you; what’s in its place is the thing his very polite Targaryen ancestors used to be before three generations of money and manners stripped it out of them, the thing he’s been told all his life he’s too well-bred to be. 

The thing he didn't know was in him until you put your two fingers in his mouth and said hello to it.

He doesn't say anything.

He yanks you up off the counter.

One motion. His hands are on you, and your back hits the cold marble of the kitchen island. His mouth is on your throat, and he’s biting you, properly biting you, hard enough to make you gasp. His hand fists in your hair at the nape of your neck, and he’s angling your head exactly where he wants it, and his other hand drops between you. Between your legs, two fingers, no asking, sliding into you with the slick that’s half him and half you and the heel of his hand grinds hard against your core. Your vision goes white.

"Yes," you breathe. “There, yes, Val.”

He kisses your throat, jaw, and tip of your nose. "Sweet girl."

"Yes—"

He pecks your mouth, curling his fingers. "Tell me again."

"Claim me. Use me, Val."

He kisses you. Bruising. He kisses you like he’s furious with you, like he is grateful to you, like he’s been holding his breath for three months and you have only just told him he’s allowed to use his mouth.

Valarr’s fingers work you with the kind of precision that asserts he’s been studying you the entire time and remembers every signal you’ve ever given him.

His thumb—Christ, his thumb—is exactly where you want him, mean and relentless, and he’s learning you all over again. Learning what you sound like when he’s rough with you, learning what you look like when you stop being careful with him, his eyes on your face the whole time, immortalising, committing the whole thing to a permanent record he will not let himself forget for the rest of his life.

You come around his fingers in under a minute.

You come with your forehead pressed to his, moaning loudly, and his mouth open against yours, swallowing the sound.

The fingers buried in you keep moving, and his other hand stays fisted in your hair, and you’re making sounds that are not words, and he’s murmuring into your mouth (that's it, my sweet girl, there she is, my beautiful girl, give it to me, that's mine, you’re mine) in a tone of voice you haven’t heard before. Low and hoarse, certain of himself, and you feel the mine hit something in your chest that makes you bare your teeth with pleasure. 

He pulls his fingers out of you, pushing them into his own mouth.

Valarr sucks them clean while watching your face.

You stare at him, still panting, your nerves on fire.

He smiles around his fingers, slow, crooked.

"Love," he says, drawing his fingers out with a wet pop, "tell me where you want me."

"Inside," you tell him. "Need you dripping out of me, pretty thing."

Valarr squeezes his eyes closed, counts mentally, then, croaked, "Counter or floor?"

"Floor."

He doesn’t lower you carefully.

Valarr goes down with you. Goes down to his knees on the dark wood floor with you locked around his waist, and he tips you back, one hand braced behind your head, the other splayed wide at the base of your spine. 

He lays you down on the wood with the gentleness of a man laying out a relic and the greed of a man about to break it open. 

The wood is cold under your back, the linen of his shirt crinkled up around your ribs. The morning sun is on you both, gilding the slick lines of him, lighting up the white streak at his temple, painting the bruises you've left on his throat in dark purple.

He braces above you.

His hair falls forward over his face. His hand slips between your thighs, lining himself up, and his eyes are on your face, and he’s waiting for the word.

"Now," you urge him.

He pushes into you.

You arch off the floor.

Valarr watches your face, he gives you the half-second to adjust, reading you in real time the way he reads everything. But he doesn’t give you the deliberate measured slowness he’s given you for three months. 

He pushes in to the hilt in one long slow stroke that has you fisting your hands in his hair and tipping your head back and making a sound that is going to embarrass you in approximately twenty minutes when you can think clearly again, and Valarr—sweat-slick, marked, beautiful,so beautiful, gone—drops his forehead to yours and breathes against your mouth and doesn't move.

"You’re so perfect," he exhales, a silky sound.

You breathe out a small, pleased sound.

"You drive me insane," he whispers, and there’s a hint of laughter in his ragged voice. “You undo me, love. Do you understand that?”

"Val,” you breathe out, feeling how the fond shortening of his name makes him pulse inside you. “Move."

He does. 

He moves the way you’ve asked him to move, the way you’ve told him he’s permitted to move. 

He fucks you on the kitchen floor, his hand fisted in your hair. Valarr’s other hand hooks under your thigh, pushing your knee up against your chest, opening you wider for him. His mouth is on your throat, your collarbone, the curve of your shoulder where the linen of his shirt has slipped, biting and sucking and leaving marks of his own, finally, claiming you along the line of your throat the way you’ve just claimed him.

His hips snap forward. Again. Again.

You feel him in your teeth. The tempo is so painfully efficient that it drives you insane. You feel him through your spine in every stroke. The wood of the floor is cold against your back, and your shoulder blades are going to be bruised by tonight, but you can’t bring yourself to care.

His pelvis grinds against yours on every powerful thrust and his hand slips between you, circling where he’s pushing into you, and his thumb is—his thumb is— 

You come again, your walls fluttering around his cock, embarrassingly, helplessly, with your nails dragging four red lines down the middle of his toned back. Valarr groans into your throat, yes, yes, that's it, sweet girl, my wolf, that's mine, that's it, give it to me, and he’s fucking you through it without slowing, his rhythm only stuttering for a second and then catching, his eyes wild on your face, his mouth open against yours.

He’s sweating. He hasn’t stopped sweating since he came back from the gym. 

The whole of him is slick and hot, the morning sun on him and you feel the salt of him against your mouth when you pull his head down to yours. His hair is a complete wreck where you’ve been yanking at it. His back is going to be a map of your nails by tonight and his throat is going to be a map of your mouth and you almost laugh in delight.

You arch under him instead. You hook your heel into the base of his spine, dragging him deeper.

"Harder, dragon."

The sound that comes out of Valarr is barely human.

A low broken thing. His name lands exactly where you placed it, dragon, not pretty thing, not sweet boy, dragon, the old word, the one his blood has been waiting for. 

Valarr’s eyes darken, impossibly so, and his hand at your hair tightens and he gives you exactly what you asked for. 

He gives it to you so completely that the world around you becomes very narrow and very sharp and he’s fucking into you with the strength he’s been hiding for three months, the strength of a man who deadlifts at dawn and rows until he aches, the strength of the thing in him that his ancestors used to ride into wars on, and it is—

It is exactly what you needed.

You bite his shoulder. Viciously. Copper burns on your tongue and you feel Valarr’s whole body lock against yours and his hand fist convulsively in your hair and his hips drive forward one last time hard enough to push you up the floor by several inches, and Valarr—

Valarr comes inside you with a sound that’s torn between a sob and a roar, his face pressed into your throat, his other hand braced flat on the wood beside your head with his fingers spread wide and white at the knuckles. 

He shakes. Through the whole thing, his hips jerking against yours in small uneven thrusts, and you can feel the heat of him filling you up, gushing deep, and you can feel the pulse of him and you can feel his teeth set into the side of your throat at the very end, marking you, finally properly marking you. Your answering moan sounds more animal than woman, your body coiled around his.

You both go still.

The kitchen is suddenly painfully silent. 

It takes you several minutes to come back to your body. 

You blink up at the ceiling blearily, squinting. You’re on the dark wood floor of Valarr’s kitchen with his weight on top of you and his face buried in your throat. The linen of his shirt is soaked through at the ribs with sweat that’s now also half his and half yours. 

Valarr breathes against your throat. 

Then he lifts his head.

He’s looking at you with an expression that’s not quite settled into anything yet. Not fully shock, or joy, not even fear. There’s only the unguarded face of a man whose entire model of himself has just been rearranged by the woman pinned under him on a kitchen floor.

He laughs. Gentle, breathless, fond. He drops his forehead to yours.

"My sweet girl," he says, and his voice is hoarse, "what the fuck have you done to me?"

Your mouth curls into a pleased grin.

You bring his mouth down to yours, kissing him gently, lingering at the seams of his lush mouth. You taste yourself on his mouth, and you taste sweat and salt and the metallic edge of where you broke skin on his shoulder, and you keep your hand fisted lightly in his hair.

"My golden dragon," you murmur fondly. “My beautiful, perfect Val.”

He laughs into your mouth, a terrible, broken sound. He shakes his head against yours.

"Christ."

You only tighten your arms around his shoulders in response. 

"You're going to ruin me," he rasps, mouth on your collarbone. "You're my ruin, sweet girl."

"Yes," you agree lightly, stroking his flushed face.

"My love, I need—"

You know what he needs; even if his body is spent, he still wants more, always more. Your knuckles fondly skim over the white streak against his temple. 

"Yes, Val," you say quietly, closing your eyes when he begins jerking his hips inside you again, pleasure raking through your oversensitive nerves as his cum drips onto the kitchen floor between you. “Take what you need.” 

“Don’t you look shockingly good,” Percy said, wiggling his eyebrows.

You rolled your eyes. “If you say one more pun, Jackson…”

He grinned. “You’ll what? thunder-punch me?”

You raised a brow “You’re tempting fate.”

You walked hand-in-hand toward the canoe lake. The plan was to paddle peacefully. No monsters. No quests. But of course, fate, or possibly Hermes, had other plans.

As Percy helped you into the canoe, your boot sparked against the metal side.

BOOM.

Five ducks took off in terror. One canoe burst into flames. The lake now smelled faintly of fried bass.

You covered your face in embarrassment, mumbling, “I swear it wasn’t on purpose.”

Percy gave a hearty laugh, grabbing a second canoe. “Good thing I’m waterproof, huh?”

Somehow, you got on the water. The clouds were lazy and the sun warm.Percy dipped his fingers in the water and splashed you lightly.

You squawked. “Percy!”

“What?” he said, all innocent charm. “You looked warm.”

Then you flicked you finger—and sent a teeny zap into the water. Percy squeaked.

“You did not just mini-lightning me!”

“Consider it flirtation,” you said sweetly, biting into the snack you’d brough, a chocolate bar wrapped in a napkin with his name scribbled on it, surrounded by little doodles of fish and tridents.

“Did you draw those?”

You blushed, looking suddenly shy. “Maybe.”

Percy’s heart did a backflip. “You’re cute when you electrocute.”

You gave him a blank look, then burst out laughing. “You’re so lucky I like you.”

Halfway through the lake, Percy pulled out a folded paper. “So,” he said, unfolding it with drama, “I made a quiz.”

You blinked. “A *quiz*?”

“It’s called: ‘How much does the daughter of Zeus know about her boyfriend?’”

“Oh, I’m gonna fail this,” you muttered, smirking.

“Question one,” Percy began with exaggerated game-show flair. “What’s my favorite underwater snack?”

You squinted. “Uh… seaweed crackers?”

“Correct! Question two: What is my greatest fear?”

“Besides spiders in the bathroom?”

“…Yes.”

“Hmm. Probably losing your friends. Or failing them.”

Percy blinked, stunned. “Okay, that got deep. I meant jellyfish, but yours made me feel things.”

You reached over and gently curled your hand around his. “It’s okay, Percy…I know how that feels.”

Percy leaned over to kiss you, his delicate hand caressing your cheek while your lips joined in a loving kiss. He smiled at you and kept rowing.

“Percy, do you think my father sees what we do on here? Like… he just side-eyed you from up there”

Percy blushed.

a/n: Aye, I’m using fancy words like “squawked” I month ago, I had no idea what the fuck that meant. In my defense, english is not my first language.

Valarr is a meticulous liar when he wants to be, but you're better at reading him than he is at hiding from you. The tell is always in his hands. The thumb of his free hand is moving, slowly, against the side of his glass. Back and forth. The same small, repetitive stroke he makes when he's working through a problem he hasn't yet solved.

You let it go.

You let it go through the rest of the fundraiser. Through the car ride home, where he holds your hand in his lap and strokes his thumb across your knuckles.

He asks about your week with an attentiveness that, in anyone else, would read as genuine interest. In Valarr, tonight, it reads as surveillance.

He's gathering data. You can feel it in the intensity of his listening. He asks a follow-up question about a colleague you mentioned, then another, then circles back to the fundraiser as an afterthought. Did you know him? The Volantene. He seemed familiar with you.

"I've never met him before tonight," you tell him honestly.

"Ah." A small nod. His thumb continues its slow circuit across your knuckles. "He was charming."

You turn your head to look at him in the back seat. The city slides past in long, golden bands through the window behind him. Valarr's profile is composed, almost regal. The white streak catches the passing streetlight, then goes dark again.

"Yes," you say evenly. "He was."

Valarr's thumb stops.

The silence between you fills the car for exactly four seconds. Then his thumb resumes, and he lifts your hand and presses his mouth to the inside of your wrist. Where the pulse is, and he holds it there. His mouth, and his breath, warm and steady, against the thin skin over the vein.

"Let's go home," he says quietly against your wrist.

You're already going home, but you don't point it out.

To his credit, he doesn't touch you in the elevator or the foyer.

Valarr sets his keys on the side table with the soft metallic click that means he's placed them in the ceramic dish you bought him for your first anniversary.

He shrugs out of his jacket and hangs it. Every motion careful, domestic, a man performing normalcy while something hums just below the surface.

You lean against the kitchen island, watching him.

Valarr opens the cabinet, takes down two glasses. Pours water for you, then himself. Sets yours in front of you without making eye contact, and that's how you know he's about to start something. Valarr always makes eye contact. He was raised to it, built for it.

The only time he avoids your eyes is when what's behind his own would give too much away.

"Valarr."

He drinks his water, sets the glass down, and glances up at you.

There it is.

Under the gold, beneath the polish, past three years of construction. The thing that lives at the bottom of him. The thing you've been coaxing out in inches since the first night you pinned his wrists above his head and watched his pupils blow.

It's focus.

The dark, fixed, predatory focus of a man who watched another man make you laugh. He has, in the thirty-minute car ride home, worked through every response and settled on one.

"Come here," he says silkily.

You don't move. You want to see what he does when you don't.

Valarr's jaw tightens. A single flex of the muscle at the hinge. The brown eye goes flat, the blue one bright.

His voice pitches lower. "I said come here, my love."

You set down your water and stroll around the island. You stop in front of him, close enough that you can smell his cologne going warm at the collar, the bergamot gone darker this late in the evening. Close enough to see the faint shadow under his cheekbone where his jaw's been set for an hour.

Valarr takes your face in his hands. Both of them. The long fingers along your jaw, his thumbs settling at your cheekbones, and he tilts your face up to look at him.

He doesn't kiss you.

He gives you the first-night look. The dim living room, the bourbon, the half-buttoned shirt.

"He made you laugh," Valarr says, softly and conversationally.

You keep your expression straight. "He told a good joke."

"Mm." His thumb traces the line of your cheekbone. "You tipped your head back."

"Did I?"

"You did. You do that when something genuinely surprises you. You tilt your chin up, and your throat goes long, and your mouth opens. The sound comes out of you like you've forgotten to be careful for once."

He recites this without inflection.

"I know that sound very well," Valarr continues. His voice has gone low, clinical, that smoky register. "I have worked, for three years, to be the reason you make that sound. I've studied you. I've learned every version of your laugh, and I know the hierarchy. The polite one. The surprised one. The cruel one. The one you make in bed, which no one else but me has ever heard."

His thumb stills.

"He got the surprised one. In public. In front of three hundred people."

You hold his gaze. "Are you jealous, Val?"

The corner of his mouth twitches. The dark thing, the one beneath the gold.

"No, my love," he says fondly. "Jealousy implies uncertainty. I'm not uncertain about what's mine."

His hands slide from your face to your throat. Settling.

"I'm reminded," he says, "that I haven't been thorough enough."

He takes you to bed.

He puts you on the grey sheets, in the room with the lamp turned down and the city a distant golden haze at the windows. He undresses you slowly. He has the entire night, and he intends to use every hour of it.

Valarr folds your dress and sets it aside on the chair. He kneels at the side of the bed and takes off your shoes, one and then the other, his thumbs pressing into the arch of your foot. He sets them together by the closet, perfectly aligned.

Then he comes back and stands over you.

"I'm going to be very thorough tonight," he tells you, unbuttoning his shirt without hurry. "I want you to understand what that means."

You watch his fingers work the buttons. The reveal of his chest, the long flat plane of his stomach, the thin chain at his throat that catches the light.

"It means I'm not going to stop."

The shirt comes off. He folds it. The belt follows, drawn through the loops in one smooth pull. He sets it down, steps out of his trousers, and folds them. Even now.

Valarr climbs over you, naked, already hard, pre-cum beading the flushed tip. He's been hard since the car, since the elevator, since the moment you tipped your chin up and laughed at another man's joke.

Since Valarr felt the small, hot, private pulse of something he's spent three years learning not to name.

He doesn't kiss you. He puts his mouth at your throat instead, at the place where the pulse is thickest, and he stays there, breathing you in. His lips parted against your skin.

"I'm going to make you come until you can't remember his name," he says into your throat. "Until the only thing your mouth can shape is mine."

His hand slides between your thighs. Finds you wet. A low, satisfied sound vibrates against your pulse.

"Oh, my beautiful love. Already."

"Already," you confirm, and your voice is steadier than his.

"Because you knew," he says, huffing a small laugh. "You knew what you were doing at that fundraiser. You knew exactly what sound you made, and you knew I'd hear it, and you knew what it would do."

You don't deny it. You thread your fingers into his hair, the dark silk of it, the coarser white at the temple sliding between your knuckles.

"Maybe I wanted to see," you tell him.

Valarr lifts his head. His eyes find yours in the half-dark. The brown one nearly black, the blue one near luminous.

"See what?" he whispers.

"What you'd do."

His jaw works.

Then Valarr smiles. A real one, sudden and blinding and a little bit feral. The most dangerous expression you've ever seen on his beautiful face. The kind of smile that reminds you, with a sharp electric jolt, that the man you built is still, underneath everything you've given him, a dragon.

"Then let me show you," he drawls silkily.

The first time, he uses his mouth.

He puts you on your back with your knees apart, settles between them, and eats you out with a focus that borders on vindictive. This is year-three Valarr on a mission, and the mission is to make you incoherent. He pursues it with the same relentlessness he brings to hostile acquisitions.

His tongue works you in long, intent strokes that hit the spot he mapped months ago and has never once forgotten. His hands hold your hips down when you try to move. He doesn't let you guide him or set the pace.

When you fist his hair and try to grind against his mouth, he pulls back and peers up at you. The blue eye gleams in the low light.

"No," he says pleasantly. "My pace tonight."

You come on his mouth with his hands pinning your hips to the mattress and his name caught in your teeth. Valarr doesn't stop. He eases you through it, tongue going flat and lazy, drinking you in, and before the aftershocks have finished, he's building you back up.

"Val—that's—I can't—"

"You can."

He makes you come again. Slower this time, his mouth gentler but more insistent, three fingers crooked inside you. You sob once against the pillow, and he makes a soft, pleased sound into your cunt that you feel in your spine.

"That's two," he says, withdrawing his mouth. He wipes his lips with the back of his wrist. His chin is wet, his eyes dark.

You gulp down air. "Two?"

"I told you. Thorough."

The third time, he fucks you properly.

He slides inside you in one long stroke and holds there. The deep, full stretch of him makes your breath leave in a rush. Valarr braces his forearms on either side of your head and looks down at you and doesn't move.

"What was his name?" he asks.

You blink, dazed. "What?"

"The man at the fundraiser. What was his name?"

You open your mouth and close it. You actually can't remember. The realisation shows on your face, and Valarr's expression shifts, a dark satisfaction settling into the line of his mouth.

"Good," he says.

He fucks you slowly. Agonisingly slowly. Long, full strokes that drag through every nerve, his pelvis pressing flush against yours at the bottom of each one. He stays there for a count of three before pulling back. Each thrust is an act of patience that borders on cruelty.

When you try to speed him up—rolling your hips, pulling at his back with your heels—he pins your hip with one hand and says, "No, my love. You don't get to rush this."

"Val, please—"

"Please, what?"

You bare your teeth at him. "Harder."

"Harder," he repeats thoughtfully. He pushes in again, unhurried. "No. I don't think so. Not yet."

You make a sound that's half a snarl.

Valarr laughs, low and delighted, his forehead pressing against yours. "There she is. There's my wolf. You're so impatient, my love. Always so greedy. You want me to fuck you how you like. But that's not what tonight is about."

"What is tonight about?" you bite out.

He kisses you, deep and unhurried, his tongue finding yours while his cock stays buried in you. The faint twitch of him inside you is maddening.

"Tonight," he breathes against your wet, swollen mouth, "is about making sure every nerve in you remembers who it belongs to."

He keeps the slow pace for so long you lose your sense of time. The room goes liquid around you. Everything reduces to the cadence he's choosing, the deep rolling press of him inside you, his mouth at your throat. Murmuring.

My love. My girl. My good, perfect, filthy girl.

Who do you come home to?

Who puts you to bed?

Who knows how to do this to you but me?

Say my name.

You say his name. Into his mouth, against his throat, into the pillow when Valarr finally picks up his pace and fucks you hard and fast. His hand at your throat, his mouth at the bite mark he left on your shoulder two nights ago. The sound of the two of you fills the room, wet and raw.

You come the third time with his hand pressing low on your stomach and his forehead against yours. The sound that tears out of your throat is practically a howl of dark satisfaction, your nails sunk into his gleaming skin.

Valarr doesn't come.

He stays hard inside you, breathing hard, his jaw trembling with the effort. His hand at your stomach presses down. The familiar, possessive weight.

"Not done," he rasps.

The fourth is on your stomach, face in the sheets, teeth ripping at the sheets, his weight pinning you flat.

The fifth is on your side, one leg hitched over his hip, his mouth at the nape of your neck. His hand between your bodies works your clit with patience that makes you want to scream and bite.

Somewhere between the fifth and the sixth, you lose the ability to distinguish one from the next. They blur into a single long wave, cresting and receding and cresting again. Valarr is relentless above you, beneath you, behind you. His hands everywhere, his mouth everywhere, his cock an insistent presence he governs with the same iron discipline he's been practising since the first night you showed him what he was.

He talks throughout.

A low, private litany against your skin. Quieter than the filthy monologue of the rug, more intimate. Less dirty talk and more a man reciting vows.

This is mine. This sound, this taste, this. How your back arches when I do this. How your mouth opens. How you say my name when you're too far gone to say anything else. All of this. Mine. I learned all of this. I earned all of this. I built myself into the man who could do this to you, and I did it on purpose, my love. I did it on purpose, do you understand? I did it because you're the only thing in the world I want to be good at.

When he finally comes, it's past two in the morning.

He comes inside you with a pained moan and his face pressed to the hollow of your throat, his hand at the side of your jaw. A long, shuddering sound that cracks at the end. You feel every pulse of his release, deep, the hot rush of him filling you and filling some more. Valarr holds there, grinding in those short blunt presses, the animal drive to push himself deeper into you. His breath shatters against your collarbone.

"Yours," he whispers, the word breaking. "Yours, yours."

You hold the back of his head. You press your mouth to the white streak at his temple, dark with sweat.

"I know, Val," you tell him, trembling in his arms.

After, he lies on his back with you draped across his chest. Your legs have given up and your thighs are shaking. Valarr's hand is in your hair. The slow, unconscious stroke. His heart rate is coming down beneath your cheek.

"I wasn't actually interested in him," you say into the quiet.

"I know."

"I've never been interested in anyone who wasn't you."

His hand pauses in your hair, then resumes. "I know that, too," he says softly.

"Then what was this about?" you ask, genuinely curious.

Valarr is quiet for a long time. His fingers sift over the top of your head, finding the fine strands at your temple. The same place he's been touching since month four of year one.

"Sometimes," he says, very quietly, "I need to remind myself that I can."

You lift your head and look at him. In the dim, his face is stripped bare. A man with a white streak in his dark hair and two mismatched eyes and the soft, vulnerable mouth of a creature that lives in fear of not being enough.

You put your hand on his cheek.

"You can," you tell him. "Always."

His eyes close. He turns his face into your palm. The press of his mouth against the heel of your hand is small and fervent.

You lie back down on his chest. He holds you, and you let him, and Valarr Targaryen does not sleep for a very long time.

He's too busy memorising the weight of you against him.

The young man shakes his head immediately. “For you? Nothing. Just… maybe a pic? A quick selfie? My cousins adore you, they won’t believe it when I show them…”

“Just tell me the price, please.” Kate tries to hush the man, who keeps rambling nonstop. The moment he picks his phone up, though, she’s had enough; taking the bills from one of her suit pockets, she slams them down on the counter. “Excellent service, thank you.”

The man watches her leave, and Kate catches a glimpse of the kid about to start crying. She’d like to go back and say she isn’t always like that, but why would she do it? Tomorrow, the same thing would happen, just like it always does. One day after the other, as the same routine slowly swallows her up.

When did it all start? Exhaustion, indifference, the pain that had already grown as a part of herself? She couldn’t distinguish — or at least didn’t want to. Not right now, in the middle of the night, when nightmares come knocking at the door.

Kate gazes at the coffee package in her hand. Would it be enough to keep her awake? She hopes so. Walking down the empty, dark streets of Gotham, she just needs to keep the ghosts away for a little longer.

She walks around a large building, entering through the camera-free door; climbs the stairs and, on some step between the fourth and fifth floors, she picks up her cellphone. Dialing that familiar number, the weight on her shoulders dissolves.

“Did I wake you?” she asks, her voice the only sound in the empty hallway.

“Mhm, no. Actually, I’m waiting for you,” you murmur as she reaches the seventh floor. “Will you take much longer?”

Kate furrows her brow, a bit confused. Did you two schedule something? Was she supposed to stop by your place? She couldn’t remember anything like that.

“I’m by my door, babe. I don’t remember scheduling anything for tonight.” She turns the key in the lock, pushing the door open. “Where are you?”

She stops dead in her tracks. “Oh. Guess I found my answer.” She closes the door behind her, leaving the package of instant coffee on the shoe rack. “Hi, love.”

You hang up, setting your phone aside as you get up from the sofa and approach her. Your hands find her face, and she lets you remove her mask. The marks on her nose and cheeks begin to hurt more intensely. “Welcome back.”

She smiles, despite the pang of pain the movement causes. “If I knew you were going to show up like this, I would have given you that key before,” she says, and her worries lessen when she hears your laughter; she likes that sound, the way it numbs and calms her. “You shouldn’t, though. It's late and it's dangerous to walk alone at this hour in Gotham.”

“First of all, it’s dangerous to walk around Gotham, alone or accompanied, at any time,” you point out, and pick up the coffee package she bought. “Second, someone has to make you eat something for dinner instead of drowning yourself in coffee.”

Kate watches you as you walk towards the kitchen, and she feels like asking you to come back, not to leave her side, to stay where she can reach you — close enough to protect her, her talisman.

“Come, babe. I’ll warm up the food.”

As she sits down to eat, the faint aroma of spices filling the air, Kate lets herself drift away. She allows herself to feel your hands in her hair, which you’ll wash and comb later, and to feel her shoes being removed, freeing her feet, which you’ll massage on the bed.

Soon, when she realizes it, she’s already on a soft mattress, covered in blankets she’d forgotten she’d bought. “You're going to stay, aren't you?”

She knows the answer, yes. Of course she does. But even so, she wants to ask — she needs to ask, only to make herself understand that, with you, she can want and ask without fear of not being worthy.

“Of course I will, babe.” You chuckle, unaware of the special place your words have in her heart, where they always land, guarded and protected. “Why is it?”

Kate closes her eyes, feeling your arms gently tighten around her, and as your scent surrounds her, she finally recognizes the peace she has sought all her life — and it’s wonderful, so much so that she doesn’t understand how she lived her whole life without it.

“Because I want you to stay,” she whispers, letting her body relax against yours. Could she ask for this? Was she worthy of such a thing? Kate wasn't sure, but it’s also her right to beg the stars, isn’t it? A first and last wish?

She falls asleep quickly and, for the first time since her life went off the rails, her sleep is peaceful. No ghosts to disturb her; all the nightmares are banished.

Kate dreams — joyful and sweet, full of life.

kate kane masterlist ;; main masterlist

Your voice breaks on the word. Cracks open, raw and wet, and you press your forehead harder into his back, feeling the vibration of him against your skull and your arms tighten around his waist further. You hold on the way you held on in the meadow, in the nest you’ve shared.

“You promised you wouldn't hurt me, BB. And this—” Your voice drops, shaking. “This would.”

BB goes still.

The fury doesn't leave. You can still feel it, coiled, massive, a thing with its own gravity sitting inside his ribcage, pressing outward against the seams of him. But the stillness settles over it like a lid over a flame. His breathing—the breathing he doesn't need, the breathing that's been coming in ragged, animal bursts—slows. His shoulders drop by a degree, and the heat recedes, fractionally, from scalding to merely unbearable.

His hand opens.

Bobby drops down.

He hits the floor hard, knees first, then hands. Then he's on all fours, gasping, dragging air into his lungs in long, shuddering, tearing inhales that sound like they're being pulled through a crushed straw. The colour rushes back into his face all at once, from white to red, the blood flooding back into tissue that was seconds from permanent damage.

Kat is on the floor beside him in an instant, her hands frantic on his shoulders, his face, checking his throat, his pulse, and she's saying his name (Bobby, Bobby, breathe, look at me, breathe) and Bobby is coughing and gasping, his eyes streaming. The red marks on his throat are already darkening into bruises that will look, by tomorrow, like a handprint painted in purple and black.

You let go of BB, stepping back.

One step. Two. Putting distance between your body and his, and BB turns to face you, his hand lifting instinctively, reaching for your face, any part of you he can touch to confirm you're whole, and you step back again.

His hand halts mid-air.

You've seen BB confused many times before. You've seen him curious, amused, predatory, ancient, tender, wrecked with wanting. But you’ve never seen BB wounded.

His hand hangs in the space between you, reaching for a face that pulled away, and his eyes—still black around the edges, the warmth fighting its way back to the surface through the damage and the fury—registering the distance you've put between your bodies. Reading the enormity of your retreat with a precision that leaves no room for misunderstanding.

You stepped back from him.

You. The person who named him. The person who leaned into his forehead kisses and fell asleep against his cool chest and taught him to dance in a kitchen he built for you. You stepped back, and the distance is a sentence he can read, and the sentence says I don't trust you right now.

His hand drops to his side.

“What the fuck.”

Bobby. On the floor. Coughing, gasping, one hand on his throat and the other braced against the floorboards, and he's staring up at BB with an expression that’s blown past fear and into something else.

Incomprehension, horror, the cognitive whiteout of a man looking at his own face on a body that just tried to kill him.

“What the actual fuck,” Bobby says again, louder this time.

The choking has left his voice shredded, hoarse, each word dragged across damaged vocal cords. He gets to his knees. Kat's hand grips his arm, trying to hold him down, but he shakes her off and gets to his feet, his legs unsteady but his eyes are locked on BB. His jaw pulses, hands fisted at his sides, and he’s staring at his own face and finding a stranger peering back.

“That's me.” Bobby's voice is climbing, ragged with disbelief. “That's—that's my face. That's my face. Why does it have my face?”

BB's jaw tightens. The ancient thing flickers behind his eyes. A flash of contempt, of possessiveness, of the territorial fury that just had Bobby pinned three feet off the ground.

He looks at Bobby the way you'd look at a counterfeit of yourself. A draft. A rough sketch someone made before the final version.

“Answer me!” Bobby surges forward even as Kat scrambles to grab his arm. He shakes her off again without looking. “What are you? What the fuck are you?”

“BB.” You say it before you can stop yourself, before the anger and the hurt and the betrayal can seal your throat. The instinct to name him, to give him the dignity of the identity he let you choose for him, is still there underneath everything else. “His name is BB.”

Bobby stares at you both. The information moves across his face in parts. Confusion first, then processing, then a slow, horrible understanding that reorganises his features into something you've never seen on him. An emotion beyond anger, beyond hurt.

“BB. That BB? What kind of name even is that?” Bobby demands.

BB’s nostrils flare. “It stands for Better Bobby.”

Suffocating silence folds over the room. Kat’s mouth pops open in your peripheral, and you suck in a breath of your own.

“Better Bobby.” The real Bobby laughs. A short, ugly sound that's closer to a bark than a laugh, the kind of noise a person makes when the absurdity of their situation has exceeded their capacity for rational response. He barks out another laugh, then, “Better Bobby. Are you kidding me?”

BB's lip curls, a flash of teeth appearing. “I didn't choose the name for your benefit.”

“No, you just chose my face. You stole my face and my—and my—”

Bobby's gaze cuts to you, then back to BB. The calculation happening behind his eyes is visible, mechanical, each variable slotting into place with an almost audible click, and you can see the exact moment the picture completes because Bobby’s expression doesn't crumble; it hardens. Sets. His jaw locks and his eyes go bright and hot, the hurt underneath the anger so vast it makes the anger look like a puddle on an ocean.

“You've been down here,” Bobby begins, his voice pitching quiet. The dangerous quiet. The one that comes right before the blade. “This whole time. Down here with that.” He points at BB accusingly without looking at him. “With some thing wearing my face. A cheap copy—”

BB snarls. Low. A sound that makes the fractured windows rattle. “I'm not a copy—”

“—while I sat in a basement for seven months talking to a fucking wall, thinking you were dead." Bobby's voice cracks open, choking. "While the cops thought I killed you. The tapes went blank, and your face disappeared, and everyone forgot you existed. I thought I was going crazy because I was the only person left who remembered what you looked like—”

He's shaking. Full body vibration.

His hands tremble at his sides, and his jaw is trembling, and the chain at his throat is shimmering with movement. He’s a man coming apart at every joint because the grief and the fury are feeding each other in a loop that's spinning too fast to control, only amplifying the hurt beneath.

Each word comes out hotter than the last, each breath shorter, and Kat is standing behind him with her hand over her mouth and her eyes wide like she’s never seen Bobby like this because Bobby doesn't do this.

Bobby deflects; he bites. Bobby is the one who turns his pain into a joke or a weapon. But Bobby doesn't break. Except he's breaking. Right now. In a pink house on Level 974, looking at his own face on a monster and the woman he loves standing between them.

“Terrence forgot you.” Bobby's voice cracks on the name. Pure pain that sinks between your ribs. “Terrence. Our best friend, remember him? The only person who believed me when the whole neighbourhood decided I was a killer. He sat with me in bars and told people to back off and drove me home when I couldn't drive, and he was the last one—the last person besides me who still said your name. And then one day I said it, and he looked at me like I was speaking a different language. Like the word didn't mean anything. Like you were—like you'd never—”

He presses the heel of his hand into his eye. The old gesture. The grinding-the-tears-back gesture, brutal and effective. “I watched him forget you. In real time. I said your name and I watched it fall out of his head and he looked at me with this—this pity, like I was talking about someone who never existed. And I wanted to grab him and shake him. Scream she was real, she was REAL, I loved her, and she was real—”

Bobby sucks in a breath so hard his whole body jerks with it.

“Eighteen months,” Bobby croaks out hoarsely, the shaking getting worse. “I nearly died waiting for you. I stopped eating, stopped sleeping. I sat in that basement until my back seized up and I couldn't stand straight, and even then I went back. I kept going back, and you're here. You've been here this whole time. Completely fine. With him. Letting him—wearing my face while he—”

Bobby can't finish the sentence. His hand comes up and covers his mouth, his eyes squeezing shut, and the sound Bobby makes behind his palm is tiny and wrecked. You shouldn't be hearing it, but you can't stop hearing it.

“Bobby—” Kat whispers, reaching for him.

“Don't touch me.” He shakes his head, opening his eyes.

And the expression on his face is the one from the doorway, the one you never saw because you were the one walking away. The expression of a man watching the person he loves leave and being unable to say the thing that would make them stay. Except now it's worse because you didn't leave. You were taken. And what took you gave you a version of him that does all the things he couldn't.

Then, in a dazed whisper, “Did you fuck him?”

The question lands like a grenade. Kat visibly flinches. BB goes rigid in your line of sight, and you feel numb shock slacken your expression.

“Bobby,” Kat says sharply. “This isn’t the time—”

“Did you fuck him?” Bobby's voice cracks, splitting, the words coming out jagged and shaky because he can't control himself. “This thing that stole my face—did you let it touch you? Did you let it—” He gestures at BB, at you, at the space between your bodies. “Were you playing Barbie and Ken down here with my—with a goddamn copy of me while everyone back home thought you were—”

He stops, pressing both hands over his face. His shoulders heave. Once. Twice. The sound he's holding back is massive, and he still won't let it out. He won't. Because he’s Bobby Franklin, and he doesn’t cry in front of people, not even now, not even here, when the girl he spent seven months talking to through concrete is standing five feet away next to the thing that kept her.

“They all thought I killed you. Our neighbours. Our friends. Clark. Strangers on the street. They'd look at me, and I could see it. He did it. The boyfriend did it.” Through his hands. Muffled, reedy, barely controlled. “Months of that. Of carrying that and going to the store every night, sitting on the floor and talking to you because it was the only thing—the only thing—that kept me—” His hands drop. His face is red and wet, ruined. “And you were here. Did you even try to go home?”

The room vibrates. The hum, the tension, the emotional charge of three people and two entities standing in a space too small for the volume of pain it generates.

You stare at Bobby's wrecked face, those bright, glassy eyes, his shaking hands. The man who loved you and couldn't say it and sat on concrete for seven months saying it to a wall instead. The man who grunted at your goodbye. The man who let you stand in a doorway feeling invisible. The man who came through the wall to find you.

“You moved on too,” you say lastly.

Quiet. Cold. The voice the Backrooms gifted to you. The flat, unmoved, survival-voice, the one that doesn't shake because it can't afford to do so.

Bobby's mouth opens. Closes. His features spasm like you’ve struck him despite the distance between you.

“You moved on too, Bobby. You're standing here with her—” you gesture at Kat, who shrinks back— “shielding her with your body, doing all the things you stopped doing for me. And I'm supposed to—what? Feel guilty? Because I survived? Because I found something down here that you couldn't be bothered to give me up there?”

“That's not—”

“You left first.” The words tear out of you before you can weigh them, before the part of you that knows this isn't entirely fair either can catch up to the part of you that’s been carrying this for months and is finally, finally letting it spill. “You left me in that apartment, Bobby. You left me standing in doorways waiting for you to look up. You left me lying next to you in bed wondering if I was still visible. And I don't know why. I've never known why. I loved you more than anything I've ever—”

Your voice fractures, words catching in your windpipe. You press your knuckle against your mouth, mouth wobbling, try your hardest to breathe through it.

“I loved you,” you repeat, steadier, lower. Your anger holding the grief upright the way a spine holds a body. “More than anything. And I didn't need to hear it. I never needed you to say the words, that’s the thing. But I used to feel it. In how you touched me and kissed me and held me. In how you looked at me in the morning. And then you stopped. You just… stopped. And it wasn't sudden. It was slow. So slow I didn't even notice it happening until I was already standing in it. This—this absence. Where you used to be. And I tried to talk to you about it, and you said don't be dramatic, and we're fine. I tried again, and you turned up the TV. I stood there in the kitchen watching the back of your head, and I thought—”

You choke on the words. Your eyes burn, but the tears won't come because the anger has dried them at the source.

“I thought maybe this is what love becomes. Maybe this is normal. Maybe I'm asking for too much. And I made myself smaller and smaller and smaller to fit inside whatever you were still willing to give me, and it was never enough. I didn't know why and you wouldn't tell me—”

“I was scared.” Bobby. Raw. Stripped to the bone. “I was so scared of how much I—”

“I don't care.” Flat. Final. Your voice hardens despite the thickness of your voice. “I don't care that you were scared. I was scared too. I was scared every single day that you were going to wake up and decide you didn't want me anymore and instead of telling me that. Instead of saying I'm terrified and I don't know how to love you without losing myself… you just stopped. You made me feel so alone. I used to talk to the walls at Clark's store because the walls were better company than you were.”

You suck in a ragged breath. It shakes on the way in, steadies on the way out. Bobby’s peering at you wide-eyed, his mouth parted, tension between you thrumming. You exhale, chuckling shakily, pained.

“And the worst part, Bobby?” you pose, not waiting for a response. “The worst part is it took me disappearing for you to care. It took me falling through a wall and vanishing from the face of the earth for you to sit down and say the things you should have said when I was standing right in front of you. You had me. I was right there. Every day. For years. And you couldn't be brave enough to tell me you loved me or hold me like you needed me. But the second I'm gone—the second you can't have me anymore—suddenly you're on a concrete floor pouring your heart out to a wall. Suddenly you remember how to feel.”

Bobby flinches. Full body, his blue eyes bright and shining. Like you've hit him again.

“And you want to know the thing that really kills me?” Your voice is shaking now, the anger fracturing, the grief bleeding through the cracks again. “I was working the late shift alone. In that basement. Alone, Bobby. Because you stopped coming. You used to come keep me company, and you stopped. I was down there by myself, sorting inventory, and that's where it happened. That's where the wall took me. And if you'd been there… if you'd just walked through that door one more time, if you'd come to the store instead of staying on that couch…”

You shake your head, glancing down. BB jerks, like he’s fighting an urge to reach for you, to comfort you somehow. “I wouldn't have been alone when it happened,” you go on, lifting your head again. “I might not have been standing in front of that wall at all. You want to know who's to blame for me being here? It's not the Backrooms. It's not BB. It's the fact that the man I loved couldn't be bothered to keep me company like he used to.”

The silence that follows is absolute. Suffocating. The hum drops to its lowest register.

Bobby stares at you. His face is open in a way you've never seen before. No armour, no grin, no deflection. Just Bobby. The raw, messy human underneath all the performance. And the expression on that face is not anger. It's devastation.

Because he’s just heard the exact truth he's been telling himself for eighteen months spoken aloud by the person he failed, confirmed, verified, stamped and sealed.

Kat stands behind him, her arms heavy at her sides, face tight with an attempt to hold her composure. She’s just learned the full dimensions of the wound she's been dressing for over a year and finally understands it goes deeper than she knew.

BB watches you with an expression you can't read. His black-edged eyes roam over your face, cataloguing the anger, the grief, the terrible release of words held back for so long. His hand twitches at his side again. The instinct—to reach, to touch, to soothe—still running underneath the barrier you imposed.

“Come with me,” BB urges, his words low. His hand lifts again, reaching for your elbow. “You don't have to stay here. Let me take you—”

“Don't touch me.”

BB's hand freezes midair.

“You're no better.”

You watch the impact of your words jolt through him. The way BB’s whole body registers it, a flinch that travels from his face through his shoulders to his hands. He absorbs it the way Entity X absorbs damage, except this doesn't regenerate. This is a cut that stays.

“You—” BB starts, his brows furrowing. His confusion is genuine, nothing performed in it. There’s no curious tilt he does when encountering new concepts, but real confusion, the bewildered processing of a being trying to understand what went wrong.

“Did you know?” you bite out.

You ask it quietly, peering at his face. Bobby's face. The face that heard you through a wall and chose to want you, that built you a kitchen and kissed your forehead and promised you things and held you while you cried.

“Did you know Bobby was out there? For months. Did you know he was looking for me? Sitting in that basement, talking through the wall. Did you hear him, BB? Did you hear him saying he loved me while you were holding me and telling me it was all his fault?”

BB's expression goes smooth.

The warmth and confusion drain, followed by wounded bewilderment. What's left is closed. Perfectly, terribly closed. The face flattening into something that's neither Bobby nor BB but something older, something that predates both of them.

You laugh. A short, bitter sound, no joy in it.

“Yeah,” you exhale. Shaking now, because anger can't hold your grief forever, the frame is buckling, and you can feel the tears starting to press against the backs of your eyes like a tide against a wall. “That's exactly what I thought.”

The room is quiet.

Bobby is on the floor with Kat's hand on his shoulder and bruises darkening on his throat. BB stands in front of you with a closed-off face and a frozen hand, the ruins of every tender moment you've shared settling around him like a ring of ash. Mr Kitty lingers in the corner, his dark shape motionless, his blank face oriented toward the centre of the room with the patient, unhurried attention.

“I need time,” you say, your voice thin. “I need… to think. I can't—I can't be in this room right now.”

You spin on your heels, walking toward the staircase, your bare feet on the floorboards. You clutch your notebook against your chest, your shoulders set in a rigid line, your chin up, and your eyes burning, but you don’t cry.

You will not cry. You’ll walk through this door and find a corner of this level that doesn't contain Bobby or BB or Kat or anyone else, and you’ll sit down and breathe.

You’ll figure out what is left of you underneath all of this wreckage.

BB moves after you. You hear it more so than see it. The shift in air pressure, the displacement, his body orienting toward yours the way it always does, the magnetic pull that has governed his movements since the first day. His footstep on the floorboard behind you.

Mr. Kitty steps into his path.

The tall dark shape moves from the corner to the centre of the room in a single fluid motion, interposing itself between BB and the door, between BB and you. Mr Kitty doesn't speak. Simply stands there. Immense, faceless, filling the doorway with the calm, absolute certainty that informs everyone, silently, that no one is getting past him.

BB snarls.

The sound fills the room, saturating it. Harsh, emotional, stripped of the controlled fury from earlier. This isn't the predator defending his territory. But something hurt and desperate, unable to reach the only thing that makes the hurt bearable, and the snarl carries all of it—the confusion, the desperation, the agony of watching you walk away from him and being told he doesn’t get to follow.

“Get out of my way.”

BB's voice is low. Vibrating. The hum in the walls responding to him, the floorboards creaking around you, the cracked windows rattling in their frames. The power coming off him is palpable. A pressure change, a density in the air, the room bending around the force of an entity that’s existed for longer than these walls have stood.

Mr. Kitty doesn't move.

The house begins to vibrate.

A deep, foundational tremor that runs through the floor and up through the walls and into the ceiling. The scones on the counter rattle. A crack appears in the plaster above the kitchen doorway. Two forces pressing against each other. BB's vast, ancient fury and Mr. Kitty's quiet, absolute sovereignty over this level, this house, this ground.

Mr. Kitty may not be as old. May not carry the same raw, limitless power that BB channels from the Backrooms itself, but Level 974 is his. The pink walls and the Hello Kitty figurines and the golden light.

His domain, his territory, his rules.

And in this space, on this ground, Mr Kitty doesn’t yield.

The vibration deepens. The figurines on the shelf chatter against each other. Bobby grabs Kat and pulls her toward the corner, away from the two entities locked in their silent standoff.

“Enough.”

Your voice. From the doorway, looking over your shoulder at the room. At BB, rigid and his mouth snarling, at Mr Kitty, immovable and calm, at the house shaking around them.

“Stop it. Both of you. Right now.”

BB's eyes are black, wild, fixed on Mr. Kitty's faceless head with a fury that has nowhere to go.

You look at BB.

It's the look that stops him. Your eyes on him, meeting his, and the expression in them—cold, hurt, closed, the warmth he's spent months earning withdrawn behind a wall he can't charm or claw his way through. You look at him the way you looked at Bobby in Santa Clara, in the doorway, in the kitchen, during all those conversations he refused to have.

“Leave me alone,” you say coldly. “I mean it, BB. Leave me alone.”

The vibration cuts out.

The house settles around you into eerie silence, the figurines stilling. The crack in the plaster stays but doesn't spread further.

BB's snarl dies in his throat, not released but swallowed, pushed down into whatever deep place he stores the things he can't process. His fury collapses inward, his features rearranging not into Bobby's easy mask but into something fragile and deeply, fundamentally lost.

Because he’s just been told by the only person who matters to him that he’s not wanted here.

Mr. Kitty steps aside.

You walk through the door, up the stairs that don’t make a single creak, and don’t look back.

BB does not follow.

The bedroom is pink.

Every surface of it. The walls, the ceiling, the bedframe, even the dresser with its rows of small ceramic figurines. All Hello Kitty, some with bows, others with tiny painted expressions of vacant, cheerful contentment that feel deeply wrong in a place where nothing should be cheerful.

The bed is covered with a pink duvet and pink pillows, a stuffed Hello Kitty the size of a small child propped against the headboard. You’re sitting on the edge of said bed in this aggressively pink room, clutching a pillow to your chest and crying so quietly your body barely moves.

You washed your face in the bathroom with shaking hands. The soap smelled like strawberries, which is either a kindness or a coincidence and in the Backrooms you've stopped trying to tell the difference. You scrubbed the tear-tracks and the grime and the black residue of Entity X's blood from your skin, and you looked at yourself in the mirror, but the face peering back at you was thinner than you remembered. Sharper. Older in a way that has nothing to do with age and everything to do with the kind of living you've been doing down here.

You looked at your own face, and you didn't recognise the expression on it, and then you did, and that was somehow worse.

You press the pillow into your chest, tears soaking into the fabric, leaving dark spots as you wipe them with the back of your hand.

A plate appears on the bedside table.

Cookies. Round, golden, slightly uneven. Arranged in a careful circle on a pink ceramic plate with a Hello Kitty border.

You didn't hear Mr. Kitty enter. You never do.

He's simply there, filling the corner of the room, his dark shape folded into a crouch that brings his smooth, featureless head level with the top of the dresser. His long arms drape over his knees. The posture is oddly casual for something that nearly went to war with a fellow ancient entity an hour ago.

You glance at the cookies. A wet, exhausted laugh escapes you. Because there's a faceless being the height of a doorframe crouched in a pink bedroom offering you baked goods, and this is your life now, apparently.

Are you feeling better, little one?

His voice settles into your skull with that warm, furred pressure, gentle and unhurried. Little one. He's been calling you that since the third time BB brought you to 974, and the tenderness of it used to make you bristle. You're not little, not a child, not something to be diminished with a pet name, but you've come to understand that little is relative.

To Mr. Kitty, everything is little. The Backrooms are little. Time is little. The enormous, life-destroying pain you're feeling right now is little. Not because it doesn't matter but because it exists within a framework so vast that even devastation is a passing thing for him.

“No,” you answer honestly. “I feel awful.”

Mr Kitty's head inclines. A slow, measured tilt that you've learned to read as acknowledgement. He doesn't offer comfort. He doesn't say it'll be okay or this too shall pass or any of the empty phrases that people deploy when they can see someone hurting and don't know what else to do.

“Have you ever experienced anything like this?” you ask, wiping your eyes with the heel of your hand. “This mess. This kind of—”

You gesture vaguely at the room, at yourself.

No.

A pause.

I'm not human.

You stare at him. His blank face gives nothing back. The delivery is so flat, so matter-of-fact, so completely devoid of inflection that it takes your exhausted brain a second to register that the seven-foot faceless entity crouched in a bedroom full of Hello Kitty memorabilia has just delivered the driest possible response to your question.

You snort wetly despite yourself, wiping your nose.

“Is everyone okay? Out there?”

The humans are safe. They've eaten. I've provided almond water. It helps with the psychological effects of prolonged exposure. The mind frays here. Theirs will fray faster than yours did. A pause. The blank head angles slightly, as if consulting a source of information you can't perceive. The older man… he was located. But he refused to come with my guidance. He's making his way back toward the entry point on Level 2. Alive, as far as I'm aware. Frightened. But alive.

“Thank you.” The words come out thin. Insufficient. You're thanking a being older than human civilisation for babysitting your kinda-boyfriend and his new girlfriend while tracking down your former employer through an interdimensional nightmare. “For all of this. For letting us—”

You're welcome in this house. You've always been welcome.

Your fingers dig into the pillow. “What about BB?”

Mr. Kitty's head tilts again. The angle is different this time, sharper, more deliberate.

The Backrooms are in disarray. An observation, not a complaint. Entity X's presence has had an unusual cascading effect. Smilers are ranging further. Skin-stealers have been reported on levels they typically avoid. Another pause. His faceless head angles toward the window, toward the levels that stretch below and above and in every impossible direction. Your boy is clearing up the mess.

Your boy. Indulgent, slightly bemused. You don’t correct him, not even now.

Entity X seems to have an unusual ability to affect other entities. Amplifying their aggression. Destabilising their territorial patterns. As if its presence is contagious. An emotional frequency that spreads through the hum, agitating everything it touches.

You think about Entity X. About the burning yellow eyes that never looked away. About the argument it played through the walls to lure you out. Why that conversation? Why your argument, specifically?

Why did it know what Bobby sounded like when he was shutting you out? The questions stack up in your head the way the entries stack in your notebook. Pattern without explanation. You can feel the shape of it, the edges pressing against the inside of your skull, but the centre won't resolve.

“Why me?” you ask, peering at Mr Kitty. “Why does it want me?”

Mr Kitty is silent for a long moment. His blank head angles toward you with that sharper tilt. As if he's reading something written on you in a frequency only he can perceive.

I have a theory. Measured. Careful. But theories without sufficient evidence are just stories. And stories can be dangerous in a place that listens and can make them a reality.

“Tell me.”

When you're ready to hear it, little one. When the answer won't do more harm than the question.

The deflection is gentle but absolute, and you know better than to push. Mr Kitty doesn't withhold out of cruelty. If he's not telling you, it's because the telling carries a weight he doesn't think you can hold right now.

You file it away. Another entry in the private section of the notebook. Another question with no answer.

“Has it—is it gone?”

Retreated. Very suddenly. For reasons I can't determine. Mr Kitty's face tilts back toward you. That concerns me more than its presence did. An entity of that power doesn't retreat without cause. It either ran into an unexpected problem, or it decided to wait for a better opportunity.

The words settle on your shoulders.

You sit for a moment longer. The pink room. The cookies. The faceless being in the corner, patient and still. The faint sound of voices from the living room floats over. Low, murmured, too indistinct to make out words. Bobby's voice. Kat's voice. Talking about you, probably. Talking about what comes next. Discussing whatever people do when the world has ended, and they're sitting in a pink house eating scones and trying to pretend their worldview hasn’t just shattered.

You reach for a cookie. Bite into it. It's good. Buttery, slightly sweet, with a texture that's almost right. The Backrooms' version of homemade, close enough that your tongue can't argue.

“I can't hide here forever,” you mumble, chewing. Your voice is scraped raw, and the cookie is doing nothing to fix that, but it's doing something for the rest of you. The simple, animal act of eating, of taking a thing and putting it in your body, of fuelling the machine. “Even though I want to.”

Mr Kitty says nothing. His blank face radiates with the particular silence that means I agree, and I'm glad you arrived there yourself.

You stand, pressing your palms against your eyes. Breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth. In. Out. The way you breathe before entering a new level, before turning a corner in an unmapped corridor, or opening a door whose other side you can't predict.

The survival breath. The steadying edge you didn’t have back in the real world and only developed here. The willingness not to run away and hide.

You wipe your face one final time. Set the pillow down. Pick up the notebook from the bedside table where you placed it beside the cookies, pressing it against your chest. The weight of it is familiar, grounding, the only possession you have that still feels like yours.

“Thank you, Mr. Kitty.”

Eat another cookie before you go. You’ll need it.

You do as he instructs, then open the bedroom door. You walk down the short hallway of Mr. Kitty's house, past the framed Hello Kitty prints and down the stairs, stepping into the living room.

Bobby and Kat are sitting at the kitchen table.

Their heads are bowed. Close together. Kat's hand is on Bobby's forearm, and Bobby's other hand is pressed flat against the table, fingers splayed, bracing himself.

They're speaking in low voices. You catch the edge of a word. Your name, maybe. Or something that used to be your name before it became something else.

Bobby spots you first.

He stands immediately, like the sight of you alone gave him an electric shock. The chair scrapes the floor. His face is a mess of competing expressions: relief, tension, the careful, wary hope as eh drinks you in. The bruises on his throat have deepened. Dark purple against his tanned skin, four finger-marks and a thumb-mark, BB's handprint developing like a collar on his neck.

You catch the flicker across Kat's face, brief and involuntary. The subtle tightening around her eyes, the tiny pull at the corner of her mouth.

She was saying something to Bobby, and you interrupted it, and the hurt of being interrupted is tangled up with the hurt of being here at all, of sitting in a nightmare for a man who’s looking at another woman with that expression. That searching, desperate, is-she-okay expression that Kat has probably been working for months to earn, and you just walked in and collected without trying.

You see it. You look away from it.

You wrap your arms around yourself. One hand on each elbow, holding yourself together.

“You need to leave,” you tell them flatly. “Both of you. Right now. The Backrooms aren't safe for humans. They were never safe, but right now they're worse. Entity X destabilised everything. Every entity on every level is more aggressive than it should be and you don't have the training or the knowledge to survive that.”

“I'm not leavin' without you.” Bobby. Immediate. Jaw set, chin up, the Bobby-stubbornness that looks like courage and has always been, underneath, a different kind of fear. “I didn't come through a wall, walk through hell and get choked out by my own doppelganger to leave you down here alone. No way in hell.”

You level him with a flat look. The one you learned living here. A part of you wants to remind Bobby that he tore into you less than an hour ago, but he's calmer now. Past the initial, ugly shock.

Bobby surprises you by holding that look.

For a moment that stretches into two, then three. Then his jaw flutters, his gaze dropping, and you see it: the fight leaving him. Not because he agrees, or wants to, but because the woman standing in front of him is not the woman he lost.

The woman he lost was standing in a doorway with her keys and her heart in her eyes, waiting to be seen. The woman standing in front of him now has a notebook and a survival instinct, and she's not waiting for anything.

“BB,” you call out.

The air shifts. Between one breath and the next, there’s a displacement, and the pressure changes in your sinuses.

BB stands at the edge of the living room like he's been there the whole time, like he materialised from the wall, which he probably did. He's more put together than the last time you saw him. His face reset, the fissures sealed, the eyes back to Bobby's blue with only a thin ring of darkness at the outer edges. The black blood is gone. The torn shirt is the same, but he's cleaned the rest, reassembled the human costume with great care.

He looks at you and his whole body orients again. That magnetic pull, that compass-needle pivot, his weight shifting forward onto the balls of his feet, his chin lifting, his eyes searching your face with a hope so raw it makes your heart ache.

Because you called him. And the part of BB that lives underneath the fury and the ancient power and the territorial instinct—the part that learned to kiss you in a kitchen and asked am I doing it right and pressed his lips to your forehead because you taught him that tenderness—that part heard his name in your voice and came running. And he’s standing in front of you now, practically vibrating with a desperate, transparent hope that calling means forgiving.

It doesn't. He can see that too. The hope flickers. Dims. Holds, just barely, at the edges.

“I need you to take Bobby and Kat out,” you tell him calmly. The survival voice. “Back to the real world. Through the wall in Clark's basement.”

BB's expression morphs. A crease appears between his brows, a tightening at the corners of his mouth. He glances at Bobby, at Kat, and the glance carries a weight that isn't quite hostility. Closer to resignation.

“I can't,” he says.

“BB—”

“The path is gone.” He says it plainly, without the smooth, closed expression he wore when you asked if he knew Bobby was looking for you. “Entity X destroyed sections of Level 0 during the fight. The corridors between here and the adjacent entry point to the storage basement on Level 0 are collapsed. The hum no longer reaches those sections. They've been severed from the level entirely.”

You can feel everyone staring at BB as you absorb his words.

“Then find another way,” you say. “There are other exits. Other entry points. You've said—”

“The only feasible exit I can guarantee right now is the M.E.G. outpost.” BB's eyes are on you. Only you. Bobby might as well be furniture. “The one on the far side of Level 4. But the direct path from here is gone. We'll have to go through the Poolrooms, and cut across to Level 4 through the threshold at the deep end. From there it's a straight corridor to the outpost, but that corridor runs through a section of Level 4 that's been unstable since the cascade.” He pauses, weighing his words. “The Poolrooms should be passable. Level 4 is the risk. Entities might shelter there because the layout gives them cover. Under normal conditions it's manageable. Right now, with the aggression spike, it'll be hostile.”

You run the route in your head.

Level 974 to the transitional stairwell. Through the Poolrooms, warm chlorinated water and blue tile, a level you've mapped partially, three pages of the notebook dedicated to its spanning layout and the way sound carries across the surface.

You know the Poolrooms. BB took you there multiple times. You used them in the past for hygiene and a change of scenery both.

The water was warm, and the light was washed-out blue, and nothing lived in it that wanted to hurt you, at least not then.

From the deep end threshold into Level 4. The endless office complex, the one that looks like every corporate building you've ever been in hollowed out and stretched to infinity. Dark. Echoing. Full of cubicles and conference rooms and hallways that dead-end without warning.

You've only been there once, briefly, and your notes on it are thin at best.

Half a page, a rough sketch, a warning symbol in the margin.

“How far?” you ask.

“Through the Poolrooms, it's distance without danger. Level 4 is the gauntlet. Maybe an hour on foot, if the path holds without shifting and nothing's nesting in the corridor.” BB's expression goes tense, focused. “I'll clear what I can ahead of you. You navigate.”

“Wait, who's M.E.G.? What’s Poolrooms?” Kat’s voice floats over from the table, cautious but steady. “What even is that?”

“Research group,” you reply, turning to her. It's the first time you've spoken to her directly without anger in your voice, and you can feel the shift, the effort of treating her like a person instead of a scapegoat to your jealousy. “Explorers. They study this place. Map it. They've been operating down here for… I don't know how long. But they're organised. They have resources.” You pause. “I think they can be trusted. It might be the safest option.”

Kat nods, quick and decisive. The relief on her face is visible. Not at the thought of leaving you behind, or at winning some unspoken competition, but at the prospect of a plan. A structure. An exit with a name and a direction and people on the other side who might know what they're doing.

Kat is a practical woman in an impractical situation; you can tell as much, and the offer of practicality is the first solid ground she's stood on since she climbed through a wall in Clark's basement.

“Fine,” Bobby says quickly, his voice rough. “M.E.G. Great. Let's go.” He pushes off the table. “All of us.”

You inhale deeply. “Bobby.”

“I said I'm not leaving without you.” Louder. More determined. The Bobby-edge again, the blade under the casual, except there's no casual left. It's all blade now, all sharp. “I'll go with Kat. But I'm not walking through some—some exit and leaving you in this place. I'm not.”

BB's lips peel back. A flash of teeth behind the Bobby-mask, involuntary, predatory, the territorial snarl surfacing before he can catch it.

The sight of Bobby refusing to leave you, refusing to relinquish, insisting on staying close to the thing BB considers his triggers something primal in the entity underneath.

He catches it at once, swallowing over it. His lips close over his teeth, jaw clenching painfully. He doesn't speak. Just stares at Bobby with the flat, unblinking intensity that tells you he’s choosing, with considerable effort, not to put Bobby through another wall.

Bobby, to his credit, ignores him. Pointedly and aggressively, with that specific brand of human stubbornness. Bobby will not look at BB. Will not address BB. Only pretend that the thing wearing his face is not standing six feet away radiating enough barely-contained fury to crack plaster.

This is Bobby's version of control: the refused glance, the turned shoulder, the full-body declaration that you do not exist to me deployed by a man who’s terrified and is handling it the only way he knows how.

BB turns to you.

His expression changes immediately. The snarl evaporates. The territorial fury, banked. What replaces it is… you haven't seen this expression on him before. Grim. Drawn.

“The Backrooms are more dangerous than they've been in—” He pauses, choosing a unit of measurement you'll understand. “A very long time. Entity X's effect on the other entities hasn't fully dissipated. Level 4 will be a problem. The interior section between the threshold and the outpost is normally dead space. Empty offices, dead lights, nothing worth hunting in. Right now it's contested. Things are sheltering in the cubicle rows and conference rooms because the layout gives them cover, and they're angrier than they should be.” He twists his head, and you hear a crack follow the near reptile movement. “I'll move ahead. Clear what I can. You bring them through behind me. Move only when you’re certain, and stay together.”

You look at him. Really look, for the first time since earlier. Past the anger, and the betrayal, past the closed-off face and the too smooth expression and the omission that restructured everything between you. You look at BB, and you see—

He's thinner somehow.

The word isn't right, but it's the closest you have.

The Bobby-suit fits differently. Looser. The cheekbones more prominent, the jaw more defined, the chain at his rebuilt throat sitting lower against collarbones that press closer to the surface than they used to. He looks worn in a way that has nothing to do with clothing and everything to do with consumption.

And you understand, then, that the fight with Entity X and the sustained lockdown and the perimeter patrols and all the emotional turmoil earlier have been drawing from a reserve that isn't infinite.

As if even ancient things have a fuel line and his is running lower than you've ever seen it.

You choke the worry back. Push it down. Below the anger and the hurt, into a place where the things you can't afford to feel right now go to wait.

“Fine,” you say. “The M.E.G. outpost. Through the Poolrooms, across Level 4.”

You turn to Bobby and Kat. Bobby is standing by the table with his arms crossed and his jaw clenched rigid, staring at a random spot just past BB’s shoulder.

“Grab anything useful,” you instruct. “The almond water Mr. Kitty gave you if there's any left. Take that, don't spill it. Anything you can carry that isn't too heavy.” You glance at Bobby, stopping him in his tracks when he tries to approach you, his mouth open. “We're leaving right now. Not in ten minutes. Not after another argument. Now. Every second we stay is a second Entity X might come back and cause more damage.”

Bobby sucks in a breath, but the argument dies on his tongue. You watch it happen. He could spit back a thousand arguments, but you’re the one speaking and he hears the authority earned through months of exploration, notebooks, and close calls.

He doesn't trust the Backrooms. He doesn't trust BB. But somewhere underneath the hurt and the anger and a thousand unspoken things, Bobby Franklin still trusts you.

He grabs the water from the table without a word, shoving it in his jean pocket. His camera is gone—left on the floor in the junction room on Level 0, the first camera Bobby has ever abandoned—and his hands look wrong without it. Empty. Painfully exposed. Like a man missing a limb he didn't know was prosthetic until it was gone.

Kat gathers the remaining almond water, tucking what food she can into her hoodie pockets. Practical. Quick.

“Let's go,” you say.

You don't look at BB or at Bobby when you say it. You look at the door, at the path beyond it, at the route in your head that threads from 974 through the transitional stairwells to the Poolrooms and across Level 4 to the outpost, and you start walking.

They follow.

“Stay close to me at all times. Don't touch the walls and don’t trust any voices you might hear.”

Your voice rings flat. Instructional. Bobby and Kat fall into step behind you. Bobby first, Kat behind him, the formation you established at the threshold of Level 974 and haven't had to explain because the hierarchy asserted itself the moment you started walking.

You lead. They follow.

The notebook is open in your hand, a pen gripped in your other, and you're annotating as you move. Small marks in the margins, corrections, new landmarks added to half-finished maps.

The stairwell between 974 and the Poolrooms is narrower than you remember. The lights are different. Dimmer. The hum is carrying a frequency you've never heard before. A low, dissonant undertone, like a second voice buried beneath the first, and you don't like it.

Something skitters in the walls.

The sound is dry and rapid, claws or teeth or something with too many joints moving through a space between surfaces, and it tracks your group for three corridors before fading into the deeper dark.

Bobby's breathing changes behind you. Faster. Controlled, but faster. He's holding it together for now, jaw locked, hands fisted, the physical performance of calm layered over a body that is screaming at him to run.

Kat grabs the back of his shirt, her knuckles blanching from how hard she grips. He doesn't shake her off.

The stairwell descends, the air changing the lower you go. Warmer, carrying a chemical sweetness that prickles in your nose and coats the back of your throat. Chlorine.

The smell of it hits your chest like a memory: public pools in the valley, summer afternoons, the way the chemical tang used to cling to your hair for days. Except this chlorine is wrong. Too sweet, too warm. Like the Backrooms took the concept of a swimming pool and replicated it from the smell up, getting the details slightly off.

“What is that?” Kat wonders from behind Bobby, her voice raspy.

“Chlorine,” you answer. “We're close to the Poolrooms.”

“Right. The Poolrooms."

You don't answer. The stairwell opens up, and Level 37 unfolds in front of you.

Water. Everywhere. Still, warm, impossibly blue; a type of blue that doesn't exist in nature, that sits somewhere between swimming pool and bioluminescence, casting its light upward onto tiled walls and low ceilings and pillars that descend into the water at regular intervals.

The room is vast, the ceiling dipping low. The combination creates a sort of compression. Intimate and infinite at the same time, the sense of a space that goes on forever in a room you can almost touch the top of. The water is clear to the bottom. The tiles beneath it are white, clean, pristine, stretching into a distance that the blue light eventually swallows.

No sound except the dripping water. The gentlest possible lapping against tile, rhythmic, hypnotic, the sound of a surface that is barely being disturbed by something you can't see. The hum is different here. Softer, rounded, the dissonant undertone from the stairwell dissolved into sound almost musical.

The Poolrooms absorb aggression the way water absorbs heat. BB was right. Nothing agitated shelters here.

“Jesus Christ,” Bobby says quietly, staring at the water with wide-eyed awe.

You wade in first, and the water is mercifully warm. Body temperature, lapping at your ankles, then your calves, then your knees as the floor descends in a gentle gradient. Your bare feet find purchase on the tiles below.

You've been here before and know the depth map. There’s shallow sections that hug the walls, and the deeper channels between the pillars which intercut with the point near the centre. That’s where the floor drops and the water reaches your waist, the blue light intensifying until the whole room looks like the inside of a sapphire.

Bobby and Kat follow behind you. Slower, less sure.

Kat gasps when the water reaches her thighs. Bobby is silent, wading after you without a word. He scans the surface, the pillars, the low ceiling, and you can see him searching for threats the way you used to. With that raw, untrained hypervigilance you had in the beginning when you could tell something was wrong but didn’t have the vocabulary to describe what.

You navigate by the pillars. Third from the left, then straight, then angled right toward the far wall where the tiles change colour. White to grey to a faint, barely-visible green that marks the deep-end threshold.

BB showed you this path. BB walked it with you, his hand at your back, his cool skin a contrast to the warm water.

And BB's presence now is a pressure at the edges.

You can't see him. Haven't seen him since you left 974. But you can feel the evidence of his passage all the same. A corridor that should have been obstructed, clear. A sound in the distance that starts hostile and cuts out abruptly.

Then a silence that follows when something deadly, fast and ancient has moved through a space and left nothing alive behind it.

He's ahead of you, running interference, clearing the route the way he said he would. And even through the hurt, the reliability of it—the kept promise, the maintained commitment to your safety—swells a lump in your throat you can’t quite swallow over.

Behind you, Kat mumbles something, a joke maybe, chuckling weakly even when Bobby doesn’t join in. His reply is swallowed by water churning around your waist.

“How long did it take?”

You say it without turning around. Your voice carries across the water, bouncing gently off the tiled walls, and the acoustics of the Poolrooms give it a quality that sounds almost peaceful, almost conversational.

Bobby's wading pauses. A half-step. Then he catches up. “What?”

“Before you slept with her.”

Behind Bobby, Kat makes a small, indignant sound, an inhale that she catches in her throat, and then silence again. Just the three of you wading through water in a room that shouldn't exist.

You wait for the usual: the blade, the joke, the easy redirect, maybe even anger. But he surprises you again.

“Fifteen months.” The damaged vocal cords give the words a rough, scraped quality. “After you disappeared. Not after—not after the store. Not after Clark kicked me out. Months after that. She'd been...” He trails off, water sloshing around his hips. “Kat was just there. Every day. And I was—I wasn't okay. I wasn't anything close to okay, and I thought I’d never see you again. And one night I just—” He pauses, breath catching in his chest, refusing to look at you or at Kat while he speaks. “Fifteen months. It took fifteen months.”

Your stomach turns. A slow, visceral roll, nausea that has nothing to do with the chlorine and everything to do with the number.

Fifteen months of absence before the body you loved pressed itself against someone else.

Fifteen months of grief before the hands that used to find the small of your back in a crowd found someone else's waist in the dark.

You do the math. You can't help it. The inventory brain, the cataloguing brain, calculating: he thought you were dead. Everyone had forgotten you. The tapes were blank. Fifteen months is a long time when grieving. Fifteen months of believing the person you love is gone is a long time.

The math doesn't help. Not even a little bit. The pain blooming in your chest is too blinding and too scalding to lean on logic right now.

You nod. Once. Keep wading, your teeth sunk into your cheek to stop yourself from being petty, trying your hardest to understand.

“Did you?” Bobby asks. His voice is different now, quieter, stripped of the combative edge from earlier, carrying instead a fragility that doesn't suit his face. “BB. Did you—with him?”

“No.”

Bobby exhales. A breath he's been holding since Mr Kitty’s house, maybe longer, released through his nose in a long, shuddering stream. The relief on his face is naked and immediate, and you can see it from the corner of your eye even without turning to look at him.

“I taught him to kiss,” you admit, still staring straight ahead. At the pillars, at the blue, at the threshold approaching in the distance. “But it took months. He didn't… he'd never touched anyone. Never been touched. I taught him to dance first. Then the kiss.”

Bobby lets out a soft, bitten scoff. Air pushed through his teeth, his head turning away, and you brace for the quip, for Bobby's deflection mechanism deploying against the image of his own face learning to kiss from the woman he loves.

But the scoff dies without becoming a sentence. It lacks heat., and it lacks edge. It's just a sound a man makes when he's hearing something that hurts in a way his defences can't react against.

When you glance at him, Bobby's face is sad. Not angry like earlier, just sad.

The anger burned out somewhere in the Poolrooms, extinguished by the tranquil water and the washed light, and what's left is just Bobby. Heartbroken. Worn to the bone by grief and stress. Looking at you in the blue glow with his eyes full and his jaw loose, his whole face creased with emotion Bobby Franklin has spent his entire adult life refusing to let sit on his features unchecked.

He opens his mouth. His lips form the beginning of a word—your name, maybe, or something else, something that's been sitting behind his teeth for eighteen months waiting for you to be close enough to hear it—but you turn away. Keep walking.

The water parts around your waist and the threshold is ten metres ahead, and you keep walking because if you stop, if you let Bobby say whatever he's about to say with that face in this blue light, you will not be able to handle it.

You're not going to have this talk with him now, while Kat is right there.

“We're close,” you say instead. “The threshold is at the deep end. Keep your heads up.”

Level 4 is wrong.

The threshold deposits you in a corridor that looks like every office building you've ever been in.

Fluorescent-lit, drop-ceiling, grey carpet, cubicle partitions stretching into a distance that the lights don't fully reach. It should be mundane. It should be the most boring level in the Backrooms. An infinite corporate complex, all right angles and fire exits that don't actually exit and conference rooms with whiteboards still carrying the ghosts of meetings that never happened.

You've seen it before. Your notes describe it as low-threat, low-entity, dead space.

Your notes are wrong.

The lights flicker. Every third tube is dead, creating pockets of darkness between the lit sections, and the darkness is too deep. A dense, weighted thing. The cubicle rows stretch to the left and right, and the partitions are higher than you remember. Head-height, blocking sightlines, creating corridors within corridors, and the air smells like old paper and burnt plastic.

“Stay behind me,” you whisper, your heart rate picking up even as you fight to keep your tone level. “Single file. Don’t speak above a whisper.”

Your feet carry you through the cubicle rows. Past desks with dead monitors and phones with their receivers off the hook, and coffee cups with something growing in them that you don't look at closely. The carpet muffles your steps. Bobby and Kat are ghosts behind you. Silent, moving when you move, stopping when you stop, their breathing controlled, shallow, and terrified.

There’s sudden movement in the cubicle row to your left.

You freeze. Hand up, the signal you developed on Level 1 with BB, palm flat, fingers spread, stop now. Bobby and Kat stop at once.

The movement continues, a shape passing behind the partition, visible through the gap between the top of the cubicle wall and the drop ceiling. Tall. Hunched. Moving with a liquid, boneless gait that doesn't match any anatomy you've catalogued. It passes through the row parallel to yours, separated by one partition, close enough that you can hear the sound it makes. A wet, clicking respiration, each breath accompanied by a small pop, like a joint dislocating and relocating with every inhale.

It passes, the clicking fading into the background as it goes. You count to thirty before you move again.

Two more corridors follow. You pass a conference room with the door ajar, and inside you spot something that looks like skin draped over a chair. Smooth, pale, and gently rising and falling with a respiration you can see from the doorway. You steer them around it. Wide. Bobby's eyes find it through the gap, and his face goes grey while Kat presses her face into his shoulder and doesn't look.

The evidence of BB is everywhere.

A corridor that ends in a smear of black against the wall. Fresh, wet, still dripping. A fire exit door buckled inward from a force applied on the other side, the metal warped around a handprint that's too large to be human. A section of cubicles reduced to kindling, the partitions shattered, the desks overturned, and in the centre of the wreckage a shape. Crumpled and motionless, its limbs arranged at angles that suggest it was alive when it was rearranged and is not alive now.

You don't let Bobby and Kat see this one. You route them around the long way, through a break room with a vending machine that hums with a frequency that makes your ears ring.

The M.E.G. outpost is close. You can feel it.

A shift in the hum, a thinning of the air that means a threshold is near. The levels get permeable around outposts, BB told you once. The boundaries soften.

You round the corner into a wider corridor—open-plan, the cubicles giving way to a broad hallway with glass-walled offices on either side—and you see the equipment. Monitors. Cables. A mounted camera fixed to the wall at head height, its red recording light blinking steadily. Sensor arrays bolted to the ceiling tiles. Data collection equipment arranged along the corridor walls with the organised, labelled precision of people who’ve been here a long time and plan to stay.

“M.E.G.,” you say, exhaling. The relief that pangs your chest is almost physical. A loosening in your shoulders, a softening in the grip of your hand on the notebook. “We made it. This is their monitoring station. The outpost should be just ahead. We just need to—”

The hands come from behind you.

Three sets. Gloved. They grab your arms, your shoulders, the back of your neck, practised and coordinated.

You're yanked backwards off your feet, and the notebook hits the floor, your spine slamming against a body wearing tactical gear, a muffled voice barking something clipped into a radio, and the hands are everywhere. On your wrists, pinning your arms, dragging you sideways toward a section of corridor you haven't mapped.

These aren't M.E.G.

The gear is different. Same black from the first attack, not yellow. No patches, no insignia, no identification. The faces behind the balaclavas are blank and professional, and they are not studying you. They’re collecting you, the way you'd collect a sample they failed to collect the first time around.

Bobby's scream rips through the corridor.

“GET YOUR HANDS OFF HER—GET OFF—”

He's fighting. You can hear it behind you, the sounds of a man throwing himself at something larger and better-armed, the crack of a fist against body armour, the grunt of impact. Bobby's voice, raw and shredded and operating on pure adrenaline, screaming obscenities that echo off the walls while someone restrains him.

“Leave them,” one of the agents says into the radio, his voice clipped, indifferent. “The woman is the objective. Leave the other two for the others, it’ll buy us some time.”

For the others. The words register with a cold, clinical clarity. Leave Bobby and Kat in a Level 4 corridor swarming with agitated entities and walk away. Leave them to die. Leave them as discarded variables in whatever equation these people are solving, the irrelevant remainder, the human wreckage.

Your rage swells to near blinding.

A sudden, massive, tidal expansion in your chest, filling every cavity, pressing against your ribs and your throat and the backs of your eyes.

The agent's hand is on your arm, and the grip is iron and Bobby is screaming. Kat is somewhere behind you shouting, and these people are going to leave them here to die. And the anger is so total, so complete, so enormous that it bypasses your brain entirely and becomes a physical thing, a vibration, a frequency—

The hands holding you fall off.

You stumble forward. The grip just… released. You spin, expecting to see BB, expecting the displaced air and the black eyes and the sound of the hum—

The agent who was holding you is staring at his hands. What's left of them anyway. His gloves end at the wrist, and below the wrist there is nothing. Smooth and cauterised, the flesh sealed as if the hands were never there to begin with.

He hasn't started screaming yet. The shock is still travelling from his eyes to his brain to his vocal cords.

You turn.

Entity X is standing in the corridor behind you.

The fluorescent lights are red again. That deep, arterial crimson that transforms the office corridor into a living organism. Red light pulses, filling the hallway from floor to ceiling, its matte, leathery skin absorbing the crimson until it looks like the corridor itself has grown a body. The featureless face is smooth and wrong, but then the eyes peel open again at your presence, and the burning yellow fixes on you at once.

On you. Only you. As always.

You stumble backwards, your heel catching a cable on the floor. You barely keep your feet.

Entity X is three metres away, and it reaches for you—the arm extending, elongating, the joints clicking with a sound like knuckles cracking in an empty room—and its chest produces a noise.

Low. Gurgling. A wet, clicking sound that lives somewhere between a purr and the settling of bones, repetitive and rhythmic and deeply, fundamentally wrong in a way that your brain can’t place.

It's a sound without analogue. A sound that a body makes when it has no face to express what it's feeling and must channel everything through the mechanics of its torso, and the sound is fixated. Directed at you.

The audio equivalent of the eyes that never leave.

“Get away from me.” Your voice comes out harder than you expect. Sharper. The fear is there. Your heart is slamming, your palms are slick with sweat, your legs trembling beneath you, but your anger is louder. The rage that swelled in your chest hasn't receded. It's sitting right behind your teeth, and when you speak it comes out as a command, not a plea. “Leave me the fuck alone.”

Entity X cocks its head.

The motion is slow. Curious. The massive featureless head tilts to one side with an almost canine quality. It’s almost the same tilt BB does, just wrong, and for one terrible second the gesture looks interested. Like it heard you. Understood what you meant. Like your anger registered as something other than a feeble attempt at resistance, and the fury in your voice is a thing it recognises, that it wants.

The agents regroup behind you. Three of them. The handless one is on the floor, in shock. The others raise weapons. Compact and military-grade, and open fire.

Entity X doesn't look at them.

The bullets hit its torso and sink into the matte skin like stones into mud, and Entity X's arm sweeps sideways, casual and unhurried, the way you'd brush a fly, and the agent closest to it comes apart.

Messily. The one behind him fares worse. The sounds are wet, almost mechanical and over very quickly, leaving nothing but puddles of gore on the floor.

Entity X does all of it without moving its eyes from you once. Bored. Performing violence with the same disinterested efficiency that a human swats insects. The agents are not a threat, not an obstacle, not even a distraction.

Entity X silences them and returns its full focus on you, and the clicking sound continues in its chest, steady, rhythmic, almost gentle.

BB arrives like a thunder crack.

The air splits around you, the pressure wave alone knocking you sideways. Kat hits the floor rolling, and Bobby staggers into the glass wall of an office.

BB hits Entity X at full force, and the two of them crash through the corridor wall and into the space beyond. Cubicles disintegrate around them, ceiling tiles raining down, and the fluorescent tubes shatter in cascading waves as two things too large for this hallway tear it apart around each other.

BB's hand finds your shoulder. Between one collision and the next, between heartbeats. He's there, beside you, in front of you, his black eyes wild and his damaged face cracking, his grip on your shoulder bruising.

“The outpost. Go. Now.”

You run, reaching for Bobby blindly.

Bobby is already moving, Kat's hand in his, pulling her along, his legs unsteady but functional, his face a mask of focused terror.

You grab the notebook from the floor as you pass it, scrambling on your hands and knees. The three of you sprint down the corridor toward the monitoring equipment, toward the thinning in the air that means exit.

You spot them in the distance first.

Yellow suits and masks on. Four of them, clustered at the far end of the corridor around a section of wall that looks slightly different. Smoother, carrying a faint shimmer that you recognise as the visual signature of a no-clip point.

M.E.G. operatives. Real ones, in their trademark gear, and they're waving at you, frantic, urgent, beckoning you forward with the full-body gestures as the fight behind you intensifies.

Bobby's hand closes around your wrist, pulling you forward, and you're running together, his callused fingers locked on your pulse point.

For about three seconds, it's the parking lot at Clark's store, it's the apartment doorway, it's every moment he should have reached for you and didn't. Except now he's reaching, his hand is on you, now he's pulling you toward safety with a bruising grip that says I’m not letting go—

Entity X's hand closes around Bobby's torso.

The grab is sudden and massive, an arm extending from the wreckage of the corridor behind you, reaching over your head, the joints clicking in rapid succession as it unfolds to its full, telescoping length.

The clawed fingers close around Bobby's ribcage and lift. His hand tears from your wrist. His feet leave the ground. His body rises—up, up, Entity X hoisting him like he weighs nothing, his legs kicking, arms flailing, his face contorted with a terror so complete it erases everything else.

Entity X holds Bobby in the air and looks at you.

The burning yellow eyes, fixed. The clicking purr in its chest, steady. Holding Bobby in one hand the way you'd hold up a lantern, displaying him, presenting him, showing you the man in its grip and watching your face to see what you'll do.

“Let him go!” You slam your fists against Entity X's arm—the matte skin fever-hot and yielding and horrifyingly close to organic—and the contact sends a jolt through your system that feels like recognition, like touching a live wire, like something in Entity X's body responding to something in yours. “Let him go, put him down—”

Entity X peers down at you, his head tilting. Curious. Reading. The same interested quality from before. Your hands are on its arm, and it's letting you hit it, absorbing the blows with the patient stillness of a thing that wants to see how far the anger goes.

It throws Bobby.

A casual, underhanded toss, its wrist flicking, the arm releasing, Bobby's body sailing through the air of the corridor and hitting the wall near the no-clip point with a sound that empties your lungs. He crumples. Slides down the wall. You lurch towards him, but Entity X’s clawed hand closes over your throat, yanking you back toward it.

Kat's scream is a bright, piercing thing that cuts through the red light and the clicking, and the M.E.G. operatives move. Two of them grab Bobby under the arms, a third seizing Kat, who was running toward him, dragging them toward the shimmer in the wall.

Bobby is dazed.

His head rolls to one side, his eyes unfocused, blood from a gash above his eyebrow streaming down the side of his face. But he's fighting.

Even concussed, even barely conscious, his hands are grabbing at the M.E.G. operative's jacket, his body lurching back toward the corridor, back toward you, and his mouth is forming your name.

You can see it, can read it on his lips, the shape of the word you taught him to say in a hallway in high school in your junior year, and his eyes find yours through the blood and the chaos and the red light and for one second the corridor contracts to the width of that gaze.

You and Bobby. Looking at each other across a distance that is about to become permanent.

The M.E.G. operatives haul him through. Bobby's reaching hand—the same hand that dropped a camera for you, that grabbed your wrist, that used to find the small of your back in a crowd and cup your face before he kissed you—disappears through the shimmer, still reaching. Kat follows, and the wall smooths over again. The no-clip point seals.

They're gone.

Entity X stands behind you. The clicking sound in its chest shifts, lowering, a frequency that almost sounds satisfied. It adjusts its grip on you.

BB's fist connects with the side of Entity X's torso.

The impact sends the massive red body sideways, slamming into the corridor wall with enough force to buckle the drywall and shatter every remaining light tube within a fifty-foot radius.

The red light dies, plunging the space into darkness lit only by Entity X's yellow eyes and the faint, colourless glow leaking through the cracks in BB's ruined face.

BB's hand finds your shoulder.

The world folds.

The displacement dumps you onto the grass of Level 14, and the impact is soft, yielding, the earth absorbing you the way the Poolrooms absorb sound.

You land on your hands and knees, and the grass is cool and damp against your palms, and you gasp. Pull air in through your teeth. Your lungs are burning. Your ribs ache from the displacement, from the running, from the screaming, from the hours or minutes or however long it's been since you ate a cookie in the pink bedroom and walked into the worst day of your life.

BB is beside you. On his knees. His hands on your arms, your shoulders, running over you with that focused, diagnostic urgency. He’s checking for injuries, for broken things he can fix with his hands, because the broken things he can't fix are piling up faster than he can count.

His fingers press against your ribs. Your wrists. His eyes search your face with a desperation that’s stripped away the last of the Bobby-mask. What's looking at you is BB, just BB, the cracks in his face leaking that pale light, his jaw pulsing, his mouth pressed into a tight line.

“You're not hurt,” he says. Half-statement, half-question, his hands lingering on your shoulders. “Tell me you're not hurt.”

You shake your head because you can't speak yet.

The breath is still caught somewhere between your diaphragm and your throat, snagged on the adrenaline. On the afterimage of Bobby's reaching hand disappearing through the wall, and the sound of Entity X's clicking purr.

You fall back onto the grass, press your palms over your eyes, and breathe. In. Out. In. Out. The stream somewhere behind you moves over its stones with the gentle, trickling sound while golden light drips over your shaking hands.

It takes minutes. Several.

The shaking subsides in stages. Hands first, then arms, then the deep tremor in your core that's been running since since the red light, since the first time you heard Entity X's clicking in the corridor and knew, with a certainty that bypassed logic, that it was coming for you.

The shaking stops, your breathing evening out. Your hands drop from your face, and the meadow is still there. All of it. The tall grass, the fallen log, the amber sky that never changes. BB sits across from you with his knees drawn up and his forearms resting on them and his face wearing the careful, watchful expression.

You rub your face. Drag your fingers across your eyes, your cheekbones, the tight muscles at your jaw. Working off the edge. Pressing the panic down into the place where it can be stored and processed later, when BB isn't watching, when the aftershocks have enough room to shake without an audience.

“Entity X is gone,” BB says quietly after another moment, testing. His voice is low and rough, stripped of its usual easy warmth. “They retreated. Again. Whatever he wanted—” He looks troubled, genuinely so. “Bobby and Kat are through. The M.E.G. have them. They're out of the Backrooms.”

You nod, staring blankly at the grass between your knees.

“You did it.” Softer now. Almost gentle. The voice from the kitchen, from the dance, from the mornings he'd say hey, baby and the world would shrink to the width of his full mouth. “You got them through. They're safe because of you. And I can—I'll rebuild. The apartment. The sublevel. I'll find Entity X and after I've dealt with it, we can—”

“Why didn't you tell me?”

BB falls silent.

A bird, the same small brown bird, or one just like it, lands on the branch above the fallen log and tips its head and watches you with one bright black eye.

“About Bobby.” Your voice is calm. Scraped clean of anger, clean of accusation. Just the question, unadorned, sitting in the air between you. “You heard him. Through the wall, same as me. For months. You heard him looking for me. You knew he loved me. You knew he was sitting three inches away from the entry point, saying the things I needed to hear.” You look at BB. His face, Bobby's face, the face you touched and kissed and studied in firelight and fluorescent light and the blue glow of the Poolrooms. “Why didn't you tell me, BB?”

BB is quiet for a long time. The bird chirps a few times in the tree above. The amber light paints his cracked and healing face, and the tense silence between you fills with the full weight of every answer he could give and the inadequacy of all of them.

“I heard how lonely you were.” Picking through the words the way you'd pick through wreckage, testing each one before putting weight on it. “Before you came through. When you were alone in the basement, on the late shifts. I heard what loneliness sounded like in your voice. And when you were here—when you cried, when you talked about him, when you said he stopped seeing me—I thought—” He falters, shifting in such an shy, human way you almost soften. “I thought we were the same. That our loneliness was the same. Mine and yours. And that I could—”

“That's not what I asked,” you intone coolly.

BB flinches. His fingers curl against his forearms, pressing into the fabric of his ruined shirt as he ducks his head lower.

“BB. Tell me the truth.”

BB's face visibly contorts with pain, his features rearranging around an admission he's been carrying for months the way you carried your anger. Not smoothing over. Not closing off. Just hurting.

“I knew you still loved him,” he admits, barely above a whisper. His eyes fix on the grass, unable to look at you. “I could hear it. Every time you said his name. Every time you cried about him. Every time you talked about the apartment, the mornings you shared, the way he used to look at you. You never stopped loving him. And I—” His voice thins, fraying. “I thought if you knew he was looking, if you knew he was right there, you'd leave. You'd go back through the wall and I'd—”

He stops, swallowing thickly. The sound is audible. The borrowed mechanism of a throat that doesn't need to swallow performing the gesture anyway because the emotion behind it is real even if the body isn't.

“I know it was selfish,” he adds in a hushed whisper.

You gaze at him blankly for what feels like a small eternity.

“You didn't just withhold it.” Your voice is steady, but your hands are shaking again. Anger and grief coiling together so tightly you can't separate them, can't feel where one ends and the other begins. “You used my loneliness. You heard me at my lowest, and you leaned into it. You built a life around my isolation because as long as I was isolated, as long as I didn't know there was something to go back to, I'd stay. With you. That's not love, BB. That's keeping.”

BB's head snaps up. His eyes are bright and wounded, but the expression on his face is gutted. Sheer hollowed-out devastation of hearing the worst possible interpretation of the best thing he ever did and recognising, with a clarity that makes his whole face crumble, that the interpretation isn't wrong.

“That's not—” he starts shakily. Tries again. “I didn't—I wasn't trying to—”

“But it's what you did.” Quiet. Final. “Regardless of what you meant. Regardless of how well you meant it. That is exactly what you did. You heard a woman crying about being invisible, and instead of telling her she was being looked for, you made yourself the only thing she could see.”

The amber light falls on his struck face, and the cracks in it have stopped leaking, the damage from the fight slowly closing, and the face that's left is Bobby's, wearing an expression he never wore.

Raw and open, and so deeply, completely sorry that the air around it seems to bend.

“You were happy,” he says quietly. Almost to himself. Like he's testing the memory against the accusation, holding them up side by side to see if they can coexist. “You started smiling again. Laughing. When we walked through the Poolrooms the first time, you laughed at something I said and the sound—” His voice catches. “The sound was the most beautiful thing I'd ever heard. I thought—I thought I was fixing it. The loneliness. The pain. I thought if I could just—keep you safe, keep you close, give you everything he didn't—you wouldn't need to go back. You wouldn't want to. And that would be enough.”

Your eyes burn, tears pressing forward, hot and insistent, and you clench your jaw against them.

Because you can hear his sincerity. The genuine, unperformed, unhuman sincerity. He heard you cry through concrete and decided, with the full weight of its ancient and limited understanding, that the solution to your pain was its presence. 

BB didn't think he was trapping you. BB thought he was saving you.

The distinction doesn't make it okay. The distinction makes it worse because it means the thing that hurt you was trying, with every tool it had, to love you well. And its best tool was deception.

“You should have told me.” Tears are falling now, and you don't wipe them. “You should have given me the information. All of it. And then you should have let me choose. Even if the choice was leaving. Even if the choice was him. You should have let it be my choice, BB. That's what love does. It doesn't decide for the other person. It doesn't curate the options to guarantee the outcome you want. It gives them everything, and it lets them choose, and it survives the choosing, even if the choice breaks it.”

BB says nothing. His eyes fix on yours, and his expression is accepting. Terrible, slow, grinding acceptance. The kind that arrives not all at once but in layers, each one heavier than the last, pressing down on whatever passes for his heart.

“I didn't want to lose you,” he whispers, his voice catching. “I'm sorry. I—I didn't want to lose you.”

You sit across from the being who built you a kitchen and taught itself to kiss and pressed its mouth to your forehead every morning so it could lie to you with every tender gesture because the truth would have set you free and freedom was the one thing it couldn't give.

You breathe in, glancing up at the sky. At those breathtaking gradients of gold and amber, laced with violet at the edges. The sky that never changes, the eternal late afternoon of a level called Paradise that exists inside a place that shouldn't exist at all.

You look back at BB.

“Do you know why I stayed?” you ask softly. “In the beginning. When I found out you weren't actually Bobby. Do you know why I didn't run?”

BB's face tightens, and the pain that crosses it is visible, bright hot.

“Because of the face,” he says, low and pained. The words dragged out of him like splinters from beneath the skin. “Because I look like him. Because you love him. Because you wanted him—always him, always Bobby—and I was close enough.”

Your eyes fill. The tears spill over fresh, tracking down your cheeks, and you stand. Cross the distance between you. Close it. Three feet. Two. One. Until you're standing in front of him and he's looking up at you from the grass with Bobby's blue eyes and BB's anguish and the meadow light on both of you.

You touch his face.

Your fingertips on his cheekbone. The line of his jaw. The scar from the cabinet door that happened to someone else's body. Your thumb traces the corner of his mouth. That corner where the grin starts, the lopsided one, the one that's his and not Bobby's.

BB makes a sound. Low. Wounded.

A vibration that starts in his chest and comes through his throat as something between a sigh and a moan. His eyes close and his head turns into your palm, nuzzling closer. Desperate, pressing his face into your hand the way he did the first time you touched him. The sound he's making is continuous, a keening that he can't seem to stop, and his hand comes up and covers yours on his cheek and holds it there, feeling him shake.

“It was never about the face,” you choke out, your voice breaking. The tears fall freely now, and you let them. “It was you. Just you, BB. The way you listened. The way you learned me. The way you held me like I was the first thing you'd ever wanted to hold. The way you asked am I doing it right after kissing me, and the answer was always yes. It was always just you.”

BB's eyes crack open. Wet. Bobby's blue, glassy with a moisture that shouldn't be there, that his body doesn't produce, that has no biological mechanism to explain it… and yet. His lashes are dark and clumped, his eyes full and the expression in them is so devastated, so completely and utterly undone, that you have to look away.

You pull your hand back.

BB makes another sound. Louder. A moan that cracks open midway through and becomes something raw and guttural, a noise that comes from the place beneath the face, beneath the voice, from whatever vast and ancient thing lives at the core of him and is now experiencing, for the first time in its incomprehensible existence, the human agony of being left by the person it loves.

“No,” he breathes. “Please. No, no.”

You lower your head. “Take me to the M.E.G. outpost.”

“Please.” His hand reaches for yours but catches only air. You've stepped back and his fingers close on nothing and his face—Bobby's face, BB's face, the face that learned to smile because you smiled first—contorts. “Don't. Don't leave. You can't—I'll fix it. I'll tell you everything, I'll never keep anything from you again, I'll—”

“BB.”

“—the apartment, I'll make it better. I'll find Entity X and end it, and you'll be safe. You'll be safe forever, I can keep you safe, please, I can—”

You can barely speak. “BB. Stop.”

He stops, his mouth trembling. The word he was forming dies on his tongue. His eyes rest on you, wide and wet, terrified.

“All that's waiting out there is a life that hurt you,” he blurts out, desperate. The words tumble, tripping over each other. BB, who is rarely inarticulate, is now struggling to assemble sentences fast enough to change the outcome. “Illness and old age and people who forgot you and—and a man who didn't see you until you were gone. That's what's on the other side of the wall. You’ll d-die. I… no. Please, no. Not you, not you.”

Your heart is ripping apart. A physical sensation of something in your chest being torn in two directions at once, the fibres separating, the tissue rending.

He's right. He's right about all of it. The world on the other side of the wall is the one that hurt you. The one that made you invisible. The one that let you stand in doorways waiting to be loved and answered with grunts and cold sheets and blank tapes that erased your face. There is nothing on the other side of the wall that is gentle the way BB is gentle, nothing that listens the way he listens, nothing that will press its mouth to your forehead every morning and hold you through the night and learn your name syllable by syllable.

But it's your life. The miserable, broken, painful, mortal thing. Yours.

“If you love me,” you say in a quiet rasp, each word costing a piece of your heart you can feel being subtracted from the centre of your chest. “If you love me the way you say you do. If that promise you made me meant anything at all, or the name I gave you meant anything... then you'll let me leave.”

BB stares at you. The tears—his tears, not Bobby's, the moisture that has no biological origin and exists only because the grief demanded a vessel—tracking down his cheeks, and where they fall the skin glows. Faint. Luminescent. A soft, shimmering iridescence that blooms along the tracks of the tears like bioluminescence, like foxfire, a visible signature of an inhuman emotion marking inhuman skin.

His agony written on his face in light.

BB reaches for your shoulder slowly. His hand is gentle, his touch almost absent.

The meadow folds around you, your stomach lurching. The golden light compresses, narrows, and when the world straightens again, you're standing in the corridor on Level 4.

The monitoring equipment. The cameras. The wall with the shimmer. The remains from operatives are mostly gone. Absorbed by the Backrooms, consumed by the level itself, the corridor healing over the evidence of violence the way skin heals over a wound. A few remain. Dark shapes at the periphery that you don't look at.

The no-clip wall is there. The shimmer and behind it the real world. A place where it rains, and people eat hotdogs and phone calls go unanswered. Where love atrophies through neglect and everyone you've ever known has forgotten your face.

And BB's hand rests on your shoulder, trembling openly. A hand that was built to hold on, that heard you, chose you, kept you, loved you and lied to you, and is now standing in a corridor doing the one thing it has never done.

Letting go.

His hand lifts from your shoulder.

You feel the absence instantly. The place where his palm was goes cold, the last physical connection between your bodies dissolving into air.

“Please,” he rasps behind you, low and shaking, stripped of everything. The charm, the cockiness, the ancient resonance, the hum's harmonic, all of it gone, the voice of a thing that has been reduced to its simplest possible setting: a being, in a hallway, begging. “Please stay. Please don't leave me alone again. Please.”

You turn, walking toward the wall. Your notebook tight against your chest.

“Please.” Louder, more frantic, the word cracking. “I'll be better. I'll tell you everything. I'll never lie to you again. I'll—I can change. I can learn. You taught me how to dance and how to kiss. How to hold you. Teach me this too, teach me how to let you be angry and still stay, teach me how to—”

You keep walking. The shimmer is close now. Five metres. Four.

“Please don't go.” His voice is climbing. Not in volume, in pitch. In frequency. The human register giving way to something else, something that vibrates in the walls and the floor, fillings in your teeth. “Please. I can't—I'll be alone. I'll be alone again. I was alone for so long, and then you were there, and I heard you. You were the first voice in—in—”

The sound fractures. Becomes a keening. A high, sustained, inhuman wail that has no words left in it, just the raw frequency of loss, a being older than language grieving in the only language it has left. Sound itself, vibration itself, the hum turned inside out and made to carry a weight it was never designed to hold.

You stop.

Your composure breaks. Silent tears pour down your face, and your mouth contorts, your chest heaving and you press the notebook against your sternum until it hurts. The keening behind you is the worst sound you’ve ever heard. Worse than the Smiler, worse than Entity X, worse than Bobby's voice saying baby? in a yellow corridor, because this sound has your name in it.

This sound is the noise a heart makes when it's too old and too vast and too full to survive what's happening to it.

You turn and look behind you.

The corridor is empty.

The shimmer on the wall pulses gently, waiting. And the space where BB stood—three metres back, in the corridor, where his voice was—is vacant. Just the flat, beige, infinite emptiness of a level that's been suddenly abandoned.

He's gone.

For all his power. For all the corridors he owns and the entities he's unmade and the levels he moves through like blood through a vein. For all the ancient, vast, immeasurable force that lives inside the Bobby-suit and behind the borrowed eyes and underneath the face he chose because he heard a woman crying and wanted to be the thing that made her stop.

The one thing BB couldn't do was watch you leave him.

You press your hands over your face, and you sob. Hard. A sound that comes from the bottom of your gut and fills the corridor and bounces off the walls and comes back to you changed, louder.

You scrub your face. The heels of your hands grinding against your eyes until white spots swim in your vision. You breathe wetly, straightening, and look toward the wall. The shimmering exit.

You step through.