Audumb

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.

What Osiris didn't expect, however, was the jealousy his dear friend possessed, as if ruling half of the country wasn't enough. As if he needed to grasp full control, make other deities weep under his hand, set a merciless regime upon Egypt and its people, always fearful of this one, unpredictable God.

He had lots of favouritism, however, from the highest of all – Ra, the Goddess of the Sun herself, who treated him gently and stood behind him quietly. Her sly eyes liked his brute and power, a thought of him being a rightful ruler coiling in her mind often, but she couldn't take his side openly, for the fate of her other deity children.

People of the upper lands build temple upon temple, Set's godly figures standing proudly, facing his red land – the desert – as if believers wished for him to protect them from the smell of passing filling these deadly sands. Pharaohs prayed too, the rulers of foreign lands cherished him, as a voice of everything bringing difference and chaos, including foreigners.

The friendship between him and Osiris bloomed, as if the merciful God was the only one able to tame the ferocious beast. The most powerful one who walked along the sandstorms wielding a scepter, his chariot bringing fear, a beastly mask making people kneel till the skin of their knees was bloody red from the sizzling sun.

Thus, how could it happen that such a loyalty ended up with Osiris's body cut through and through in madness, with his chamber looking rather like a bloody bathhouse? What thought has pushed the God of Storms to such deception? How could he have killed the ruler of Egypt himself?

And how could other Gods allow him to take over Osiris's throne just like that?

"My dear child," the voice of your mother was soft as her hands, cupping your cheeks gently. "The day is coming, you know of it, right?"

You nodded faintly, golden hoops clinking with the move of your head. She looked at you with love and tiredness, soft hair caressing the tip of your nose as she hugged you lovingly, with a faint tremble of her body.

"Mother," you started, hearing her weeping. "Mother, it's alright. I can do it, don't have any other choice."

And true it was, because as the only daughter of long-dead Osiris, the child no one knew of, you finally needed to go for what was rightfully yours. The throne of Egypt.

You weren't a deity yet, though of divine blood born, and the Goddess name given you was Horus, for the birds that always surrounded you and kissed your cheeks gently, bringing you a piece of sky to your body, hidden carefully in the deepest chambers of Isis's temple. She was a great mother, right Goddess, a crucial one, caring for magic, fate itself even, but she wasn't strong enough to overrule the slayer.

None of the Gods was, as Set was the most powerful deity, the most treacherous one, with a scepter heavier than Duat's monsters, making the pantheon tremble every time it hit the ground. In fact, you also couldn't defeat him by power itself, but wished for the Godly court to acknowledge your right to the throne. And maybe keep you safe, before he would wish to kill you.

Because he'll try to, and that's why your mother was weeping like a child, drenching your white robes with her tears. You were the only child they had conceived before your father's death, and a woman at that – truly unfortunate! For if you were a son, winning the power back would be much easier. Maybe you could even try to conquer Set, though the heavens would collapse before anyone could do it.

The faithful day came faster than you wished for, and now, it was time to walk proudly towards the Ennead, with other deities eyeing you up. Something bubbled in your throat, while a heavy falcon mask rested on your head. The white robe hung loose on your body, draping shoulders and legs, down to your ankles, making you look rather boyish and slim. Your mother didn't want to reveal your gender, yet, as it would be safe to do after the official approval of the council. But, well, how truly powerful the council was if they couldn't overthrow Set's cruel regime?

Your breath quickened when you took the next steps towards the great temple where Ennead – all nine, no, now eight gods, forming a rightful court – waited for the meeting your mother had called. She was there too, as you entered the hall, sitting with others high and mighty, with golden thrones hidden under the marble arch, their eyes watching you as your legs moved across the sandy road, under the blazing sun, and nothing but a deep wish for it to already end.

The meeting was set in the temple of Maat, Goddess of Truth and Justice, the one who weighs the hearts of the dead in Duat, a deity who could herself decide the truthfulness of your words and abolish the trickery of the usurper. And your mother was quite satisfied with this place too, because if there was someone Maat despised the most, it was the embodiment of chaos and brutality itself – Set.

And you saw him right away.

The moment you stepped inside the temple, he was there. Standing lazily in front of the deities, with arms crossed, one hand clutching a long scepter ending with a blade, reflecting the cold, marble columns of the temple.

Massive. That was the first word that came to your mind.

No, monstrous.

Your mother told you of him, and you should expect the God of War himself to be well-built, but you truly misjudged your expectations.

Set – or Sukuna, as his non-godly name sounded – was a monster himself, at least twice as tall and broad as you. His back was turned your way, wide as dunes, rising in peaks of heavy muscle beneath sun-kissed skin slick with heat. Droplets of sweat traced slow paths down his golden surface, catching the scorching light of the rising sun. Black tattoos wrapped tightly around his body, intricate and deliberate, for now visible only across his back and—

Four arms.

Oh God.

The temple suddenly fell quiet, smaller deities standing around with mouths gaping, glancing between you and Sukuna. He didn't look your way even for a moment, with his back proudly straight and chin up, muttering something about wasting his time and sighting heavily.

He didn't look at you even as you stood in the same line as him, though at least two meters away, keeping the distance as he truly could wrap one of his four hands around your throat if he wished to.

Your breath was ragged, head filled with thoughts, and eyes suddenly bulged as you looked at him secretly.

A heavy mask rested upon his head, grazing his shoulders. Its long ears ended in squared tips, a dark snout curving downward, eyes deeply set and fixed toward the court with stillness. You could not see his face – no more than anyone could see yours beneath the blue falcon mask that hid you from the nose up. Yet what little was visible betrayed his strength – a sharp, defined chin, lips pressed into a firm line. Black markings ran from his jaw down his neck to his chest, hugging the authority of his body.

Your gaze drifted lower despite yourself, tracing the breadth of his shoulders, the four burly arms flexing subtly, the solid muscles of his chest and abdomen carved as if from sandstone. And then–

Dear Lord.

Was that… a mouth?

He stood still beneath the blazing Egyptian sun, divine and dreadful all at once – a true god and a monster.

"Child," a feminine voice has suddenly spoken, and a woman with feathers on her arms stood in front of the Ennead – Maat. Your mother was there, glancing at Sukuna with the tip of her finger between lips, as if trying to predict his reaction. "Please, let us know your name."

You gulped, mask showing nothing but a part of your cherry cheeks, as you glanced at all eight Gods sitting in front of you. "I present under my divine name Horus."

Small Gods murmured, their eyes never leaving your white-clothed figure, with golden bracelets hugging your still arms.

"And who are your parents, child?" She asked again, with a soft voice. It sounded sweet as honey, pleasant to your ears as you once again took a deep breath.

"My mother–"

"And who the fuck cares?" a voice thundered through the temple, low and heavy, silencing all the murmurers solely with the darkness of its tone. The hit of the metallic scepter followed, and the floor shook.

Sukuna cleared his throat, two upper arms crossed on his broad chest, lower ones hanging loosely, with one clenched around the tall pole.

"My God, please use proper language," Her voice was stern when she scolded him, with feathers on her arms tensing.

"Then speak quicker," Sukuna barked. "I showed you mercy by not ruining this council, so stop wasting my time."

"My God, this council serves other deities and believers, too. We do not aim to infer your rule. However–"

But Maat's words seemed to pick Sukuna's attention, with his body tensing slightly. Before he could bark another order, however, one of the eight Gods interrupted. "Maat, could you please tell us what the reason is for the Ennead meeting? My God, please grace us a bit of your time."

Maat took the golden scroll clutched in her hands and rolled it slowly, with a gentle frown appearing between her brows. It seemed like no one besides you and your mother knew the reason for the meeting, and this alone made you stress even more.

"The meeting was held at the request of Goddess Isis. She wants the council to consider this child and its godly lineage, for its mother is the Goddess of Magic herself and Father..." Her voice suddenly flattened, as if stuck in her throat. Lips parted, eyes gazing between you and Sukuna, with a trace of some strange sense. Dread? Concern?

"Who is it?" The council asked.

"And Father is God of Fertility, Osiris."

It was fast.

Too fast.

Something you should have expected and prepared for, but truly didn't have time. As before you saw your mother's widening eyes and Maat turning towards the council, you already couldn't breathe.

Two strong hands clenched on your throat, picking you up, up, up, till your feet were hanging loosely in the air, lungs burning, gaze on the same level as the eyes of a beastly mask.

It was pure chaos, with your mother's screams ringing somewhere, the council having no power whatsoever over the raging monster that grabbed your weak body, and other deities looking at you with compassion. Such an unfortunate child, to stand in front of the usurpator himself without any guard!

"My God, please!" your mother cried, lips trembling at the sight of your nails scratching Sukuna's hands relentlessly, from palms till forearms, leaving bloody trails over his burning skin.

"A child, huh? So your whorish mother somehow managed to keep you hidden for that many years." He murmured, voice low enough to speak solely to you. "Aren't you just a weakling for a man? What, wanted to take the throne back? Challenge me?"

But you couldn't say anything, with your chest shrinking under the shortage of breath and fingers trying to loosen his merciless grip.

"Say something, boy. That's what you came here for." Sukuna laughed deeply, looking at your wringing body, till... till something caught his eye.

He didn't see it before, skipping your weak posture and not gracing you with a single glance, but from that close, your body didn't look masculine at all. In fact, his third hand grazed the arc of your ass and the slim of your waist, fingers going up, up, up, till it met with something soft and heavy.

The next second, your flushed face and bloodshot eyes met with long beams of sunshine. Mask dropped heavily down the sand, letting loose hair cup your rosy cheeks, drenched with weighty tears, smooching your skin. It was bright, too bright, with all the deities looking at your face – very red, very delicate, very feminine. As none of them expected a woman hiding under the falcon's mask, with her look so lovely and cheeky, it made some hearts tremble in sympathy.

But it seemed Sukuna was shocked too, as his fingers loosened up a little, his lips opened, as if he wanted to throw your way another filthy comment.

Before he managed, however, he completly lost his grip and dropped you down on soft sand. Heavy cough shook your body, air tasting like the sweetest treat, as you took deep breaths to calm your burning lungs.

Your eyes looked up, seeing God in a rather odd position – tied by golden threads. All four of his arms behind his back, neck bound to wrists, wrists lashed to ankles, as he kneeled down with muscles bulging under the flimsy rope.

"What a sight!" A deep voice cut through the air, before the crowd gasped.

Something, someone, entered the temple, with a halo around their body so radiant, you could swear that the Goddess of the Sun herself had descended to earth.

And, well, it seems you were right.

For a myth clothed in white, almost misty robes was walking your way, with sun-kissed hips swaying swiftly and heavy breasts covered by long, black hair. She looked breathtaking, potent, with a gaze so intense it made your eyes drop immediately, glancing nowhere but at your bare feet. Her voice was low but gentle, almost motherly, with a hint of cheekiness, for the Goddess of the Sun was the mightiest deity, more powerful than Osiris himself, and all the current gods came directly from her womb.

"My Goddess," the council spoke quietly, bowing their heads. "What brings you here?"

But Goddess of the Sun, Ra, simply waved her hand, standing next to kneeling Sukuna.

"Oh my, you truly wanted to kill this sugar, hm?" She giggled quietly, seeing God of War himself in such a pathetic state. Although if he wished, he certainly could break the golden thread with the sole force of his arms.

But the Goddess of the Sun always liked him the most and treated him with kindness; killing her would be not only a hassle but a waste.

"Ra, what are you doing?" He muttered, golden lines digging into his skin.

Goddess looked rather cheeky when her deep, lined eyes moved to you.

"You've grown up to be such a beautiful woman. Although presenting yourself like that was rather foolish," She giggled and helped you stand up. "You truly look like him."

Her words seemed to echo in the speechlessness of the temple, forcing other deities to furrow their foreheads and raise the whispers once again. Including Ennead, for they tilted their heads, as if in mishearing.

"My Goddess," Maat started. "You knew about all of it?"

"Of course! I'm the Goddess of Sun, know of everything going on down here."

Maat cleared her throat, trying once again. "My Goddess, you should've informed us of Osirisi's heir. We could've–"

But Ra scoffed and rolled her eyes, fingers grazing your soft cheeks. "And you would do what? Let this brute kill the baby? Oh, please, this is much more entertaining!"

Because one thing the Goddess of the Sun was known for was her love of amusement. She wasn't usually meddling with the affairs of deities nor the council per se, but if there was a chance to gain something and have much fun with it, Ra would be the first one take her pleasure. She didn't rule like she used to, but remained the most powerful God in the whole pantheon, appearing here and there as she wished, but never siding with anyone directly.

Well, at least that's how it should be, but her favour of Set was built upon years of his protection and serving loyally by her side. He was the killer of one god, but the guardian of another. Such an odd man!

"My Goddess, according to the law, she's the one who ought to claim the throne. Does it mean that Set–"

But Ra sighted deeply, kohl-lined eyes with a gentle swirl at the ends glued to your face, as if thinking what to do with such a pure child!

"Yes, it means she should claim it–"

"You whor–" Sukuna started, but golden threads suddenly put him in a muzzle.

"But!" Ra raised her finger, eyes glancing back at the tamed monster. "God of War is a current ruler, thus it's only fair for them to compete."

The silence that fell in the temple was, well, heavy would be an overstatement.

Compete? You? Has she seen your body? Has she seen his body?

If she meant to compare your powers, you had nothing on the thousand-year-old God of War, who could raze the whole of Egypt to the ground with a single hit of his scepter.

"What do you mean by 'compete', my Goddess?" Maat furrowed her brows, looking at the cheerfulness that filled the woman.

"Well, think about it! Do you truly believe that giving a throne to a girl like her, with zero knowledge of ruling or battling, would be smart? Maybe she is Osiris's daughter, but he's been long dead, and we moved on!" She laughed loudly, raising a wave of murmurs. In the corner of your eye, you saw your mother's clenched jaw and fingers digging into the golden throne. "Let them have a competition then. The one who wins will rule Egypt."

She then glanced between you and Sukuna, his arms wriggling under the golden thread, mouth tightly shut, and you wished to his face fully, just to have a peek at the fury that must have filled his eyes.

"What do you say, dears? Do you want to compete for power?" She looked you straight in the eyes, as if feeling your hesitation. "Don't worry, dear, you won't have to fight him directly."

You could almost feel the gaze of your mother putting a hole through your skull, so you agreed with a gentle nod of your head. Ra moved her gaze to Sukuna before snapping her fingers. Golden thread left his body as he took a deep breath and stood up straight, towering over both of you.

He didn't say a word first, deep eyes of a beastly mask looking at you from above, with four arms this time crossed on his chest and abs. The mouth on his abdomen was closed, and maybe you noticed a hint of curiosity swirling in your mind, over how it could feel–

"Good," Sukuna almost roared, sending chills down your spine.

"Excellent!" Ra clapped her hands. "Maat, dear, you know what to do!"

Maat sighed, looking at the council who could truly do nothing but nod their heads and let Goddess of the Sun have her fun.

Something suddenly panged in your chest, as if moving, wriggling, trying to run off, and before you noticed, your heart appeared in Maat's left hand, with another one, twice bigger, in her right. She put them both on the golden scale in front of her, the same one she used to weigh sins of the dead.

"Then both of you agree and promise to participate in contendings for the rule of Egypt lawfully and fairly, is that right?" Maat said, glancing at warm hearts beating slowly on the golden plates.

"Yes." Both you and Sukuna answered.

"Both of you agree to partake in events chosen randomly by the Ennead and give rule to the one who'll win at least three, is that correct?"

"What a crap, I could just kill her if I wanted to," Sukuna muttered, fingers itching just to grab your neck once again.

But this time, maybe in a different setting, as those pouty lips of yours, together with wet, blushed eyes, somehow couldn't leave his mind.

"Set," Maat started slowly, as if trying to calm a ferocious beast. "If you win, you'll be acknowledged as the rightful ruler of Egypt, and the council will strip you of the usurper's name. Noone will ever try to seize your throne, non interefere your rule in any way."

Sukuna tilted his head, black ears following his move, as if thinking about having pathetic competition with this brat or just killing her on the spot.

"Fine." He finally grumbled.

"Good, it's settled then. The competition will start in four days, till then you may stay here and relax." She turned towards the council, waiting for the row of their nods. "I announce the meeting of Ennead as finished."

𓂀 𓂀 𓂀

The first day has passed quietly. You settled in your chamber, and a temple was big enough to have both you and Sukuna without ever letting you meet one another.

Your mother wept for some time, apologising for the mess and such an unpredictable turn of events, cursing the Goddess of the Sun with the harshest words you've ever heard from her lips. You tried to console her (walls have ears!) and ensure that the competition would surely be fair, although you didn't believe it yourself. For how else should you fight for the throne if not by using power?

And as she couldn't stay with you inside the Maat's temple, she left in the evening of the first day, kissing you goodbye and promising to convince the Ennead and beg them to show your grace.

On the second day, you walked around the place and enjoyed being alone for the first time, as till now your life had been focused on nothing but planning the overthrow of Sukuna. Maat's temple laid between the dunes, in deep parts of Lower Egypt, far away from the Upper region ruled by Set. You wondered how she felt to have the embodiment of chaos itself under her roof, the trickster and brute, who represented everything she tried to get rid of in this world. But she was too good and needed to stay objective, thus constantly hiding in her chamber just to not meet Sukuna himself.

You walked these corridors as if the temple belonged to yourself only, glancing at tall, stony walls painted with Maat's myths and mixing in rays of colour, wrapping around columns up to the roof. Dunes from the huge window of your chamber looked magnificent during the day, but even more beautiful in the night, with the temple's gentle torches lighting the paths leading towards the desert.

"The view is better from the bathhouse." Maat mentioned the third day, and you decided to use her offer.

Thus, in the evening, draped only in white, flowy robes, easy to put on, but even easier to slip off, you went towards the bathhouse. Warm fire of the torches kissed your skin gently, leading your bare feet straight to the big chamber, with nothing but a huge pool and sparkling stars looking at your bare body. It seemed empty and quiet, if you didn't count the quiet whispers of the sand as it moved together with a cheerful wind. The desert was usually cold at night, but hot water warmed your body, wetting your feet and calves, going up till your soft belly and the swell of your breast, dipping under blue waves.

"Oh dear," you moaned quietly, tilting head back. It truly was relaxing, and the dunes looked splendid, dancing before your gentle eyes like an oasis.

All the stress for tomorrow's event suddenly vanished, with the warm water and the hum of sand clearing your body of all the worries.

But it seemed as if your time couldn't last long, as soon you heard a pair of heavy footsteps moving up behind you. Your eyes were closed, but the moment water dribbled, you opened them carefully, peeking at the person who caused water to spill over the pool's edge.

And you wished to leave this bathhouse immediately.

As the small waves were moved by his muscular body and meaty thighs, prodding the pool to sit right in front of you.

Sukuna.

But this time, without his beastly mask.

Just pinkish hair and ferociously crimson eyes, looking your way with the heaviest stare you've ever felt, almost pushing into the pool's wall behind you. His face was sharp and handsome, absolutely stunning, with almond eyes sitting deep right above the slightly bumped nose and pursed lips. You noticed two smaller eyes right on his cheeks and black tattoos carving his face like a godly tablet. He sat lazily, with four arms draped over the edge and massive thighs opened. The bathhouse's water was, unfortunately for you, crystal clear, and your eyes dilated, breath hitched at the sight of two–

"What are you looking at, brat?" He chortled, carefully following the gentle blush that bloomed on your cheeks, and hands trying to immediately cover up your breasts. "Why? Shy? Just a second ago, you were looking at me quite openly."

"I wasn't." You mumbled, thinking whether you should stay and try to rest or leave this monster alone.

Sukuna tipped his head, humming softly under his nose. "Do you truly believe that you can win against me?"

You didn't respond, closing your eyes once again to gain a bit of long-gone peace. He looked amused, following the curve of your breasts and the softness of your belly. Thighs clenched on the bench, with clear water giving him a perfect look at the mound of your cunt.

"I could defeat you without using strength." He added, something in his lower parts budging, at the mere sight of your lips that grimaced at his words.

"We'll see tomorrow." You stated, trying to finish this dilly-dally again.

"I don't know what you'll see, but surely I will see myself getting the throne back."

Your eyes abruptly opened, brows wrinkled, as moved by his foolish words. "You truly are arrogant, my God. Not only have you killed my father without a reason, but you also think of the throne as yours to take. Laws were made to be obeyed."

The corners of his lips suddenly turned up in a sneaky grin as he watched your face turn feverishly red. "Without a reason? That's what your whorish mother has told you?" Your mouth parted, as if stupefied. "Besides, I'm a God of War, Chaos," He lifted his fingers, twirling them gently. A part of a high dune on the horizon rose, till it soon flattened down with the rest of the desert. "Sand. You truly think that laws mean anything to me?"

He straightened up, unshameful eyes outlining your body up and down, resting longer on parted lips and pulled thighs. "If they did, maybe I wouldn't kill your father."

His words tore your heart apart, but lustful gaze and quiet voice made your stomach turn. You wished to hate him (truly!), but it was the first time someone had looked at you like that. With a look you could only compare to a starving jackal, strolling around its prey in circles, lingering patiently for its last breath. He had you at the length of his arm, and if he wanted to, he could easily grab your neck and pull you straight to his hardening cocks. Plural form indeed.

But he didn't. Just waited, patiently, as you wriggled under his eyes, trying to look everywhere, but not at his naked body and muscles upon muscles.

The air was tense, heavy, sticky with a sweat dripping from both of your bodies and filling your throat until breathing became difficult.

You needed to end this, quickly.

But before you stood up, his deep voice slashed through your ears once again. "Try to run away, and I'm gonna tie those pretty legs of yours."

His crimson eyes followed every frown of your forehead, gentle eyes gazing at him with fear, wet lips opening and closing, as if thinking how to deal with a brute of his sort.

"You can't hurt me according to law," you mumbled on one breath. "Why don't you just wait till tomorrow to kill me?"

And then – he laughed. Deeply, till his chest trembled and something in your core clenched. For all of his arms stretched towards you, long enough to graze the sizzling skin of your cheek. His thumb alone was thrice the size of your nose, and when it brushed your parted lips, you could do nothing but open them under his heavy touch.

"I don't want to kill you, brat," he muttered, feeling your warm breath hugging his calloused skin. "You know what's the easiest way to defeat God?"

You frowned, head shaking. The grin on his face looked devilishly handsome.

"Of course you don't, you're nothing but a stupid girl. Tell you what," his fingers dropped down to your chin, neck, wrapping around your skin brutally, but gently enough to still let you breathe. "Your whorish mother should have taught you this while keeping you closed. We, Gods of Egypt, have morals too, and according to our custom, the easiest way to overpower someone is to make them consume..." Oh, you knew. You've heard of it, read about it in books that sat dusty in Isis's temple. Skimming then sinfully, with a blushing shame, reading about that stuff between Gods and humans, though never experiencing them yourself.

For a God to lose their face in front of another one, they needed to consume their semen!

Sukuna chuckled, noticing your bulging eyes. "But, well, you found yourself in a pretty uncomfortable position here. And you know why, right?"

You glanced up, meeting his crimson gaze and tilted head, pinkish hair slightly wet from a floating steam and muscles dripping with sweat.

Of course, you knew.

"Because I'm a woman."

Thus, even if you desired, there was no way for you to defile Sukuna. But as for him...

And within the next second, you were suddenly pulled. All of his hands on your body – neck, waist, thighs – seating your dripping cunt riiiight on his two hard cocks. You strangled his hips with a shuddered breath, eyes on the same level as his, hands placed gently on his broad chest, lower belly stuck to–

"Mhmm," you moaned quietly, feeling a long and heavy muscle tasting the sweatiness of your skin.

Mouth on his abdomen opened, grazing your belly with its sharp teeth, kissing it gently with its tongue, going down down down, till you felt it on your mound.

"Smart girl, aren't you?" He chuckled, taking the wholeness of your face.

Flushed cheeks, rinsed like cherries, dimmed eyes with little droplets swirling in their corners, parted lips with sweet, little moans escaping from your clenched throat. You shuddered when his lower mouth bit the plush of your belly, tongue trying to go down lower, just to taste the sweetness of your cunt. And sweet it must've been indeed, because he couldn't stop thinking about your scent and the softness of your skin from that feral moment.

"But I'm not a brute like your father, so say that you want it, hm?" his voice dropped, one hand moving up to the swell of your breasts, thumb brushing the perked nipple gently. "Say that you want it, and we'll make a deal."

"W-what dea–mhmmm," you tried to ask, but your voice suddenly fell flat upon feeling the wet tongue swirling around your nipple.

Another mouth?

Sukuna chuckled, all four hands keeping your wiggling body tight in place – two on your asscheeks, parting them slightly and moving along his cocks, one around your throat, one on your flushed tits. And as monstrous as he was, he could manhandle your melting body using the tiniest bit of his power. You arched, feeling his heavy cocks catching on your dripping pussy, water flowing over the edge of the pool as you gripped his muscular shoulders.

"C-can you please s-stop for j-just a moment," you somehow choked out, nevertheless softening into his body like a slut, rubbing over his shafts, soaking them with gummy saps. Both of his hands moved your hips up, till they finally met with the cunning tongue of his lower mouth.

"Why? Distracted? Do you wish for me to do it tomorrow in front of your mother?"

Oh dear, you jerked at this sheer thought, but words caught in your throat the moment his lower tongue gave you meaaaan and filthy jolt. Its monstrous size wrapping around your whole cunt, licking, slurping, curving your drenched folds solely with its tip.

His fingers gripped the curve of your ass, moving your cunt up and down on his fatty tongue. And you tasted so fucking delicious. He wouldn't admit it outloud, but the moment his mouth swallowed the first droplets of your slick, something in his chest shook, cocks hardned, feeling the sugary sweetness of your drenched cunt.

"Let's make a deal, then. You," heavyyy lick. "Will back out of the trial."

"N-no–"

Teeth of his monstrous mouth bit your clit, till you deflected, back arching from the painful pleasure that dripped down your spine.

"Shut up, brat, let me speak. I will be the ruler of Egypt. But," as if feeling your pain, his mouth quickly gave you another lick, sucking on your plumped clit gently, pushing its tip through your squeezing folds, licking every corner of your dripping cunt. "You will rule with me. As my wife."

You moaned needily, desperately, feeling spongy muscle inside your pussy, big enough to already fill you up, tormenting this one chubby spot, till a gentle fog covered your eyes.

"A w-wife?"

Sukuna moved your hips, droplets of sweat forming on his temple because, fucking God, he had never eaten out a cunt like this, so creamy and sweet, moving together with his tongue like a good slut, leaking all over his meaty thighs and catching on his throbbing cocks till a faint, almost unhearable groan bubbled in his throat. Your walls clenched around his tongue, lips mumbled something under your sugary breath, as you wrapped your arms around his neck, with fingers tugging pinkish strands.

"What? Thought you wanted to rule? Do you think a weak woman like you could do it alone?" He chuckled, upper hands moving to the curve of your back, pushing you gently towards his broad chest. And you felt too good and fucked to care, feeling his breath tickling the plush skin of your ears. "I'm gonna give you a power, you will give me lots of successors, hm? That's the best I can offer, brat. Don't even try to challenge me, or I will fuck you stupid and fill you with my cum in front of your mother."

His words echoed in your head, lower tongue lapping through your folds relentlessly, teeth grazing your mound, tip pushing against the spongy spot, swallowing sweet and creamy cum that trickled down its meaty muscles.

"So?" he pushed, thumb of his upper hand cupping your drenched cheeks, crimson eyes looking straight at yours. Fucked, defeated, gleaning at him humbly, pathetically, with salty tears wetting the pads of his fingers. He leaned closer, lips licking droplets from your rosy cheeks, kissing you messily, going down, down, till he swallowed another moan escaping your throat. "Will you be my wife?"

You didn't really have time nor opportunity to think it over, already feeling a warmth coiling somewhere in your lower belly and walls clenching around his tongue. So you nodded politely, moving your hips up and down, up and down, riding his muscle like a good little slut.

"That's my girl," he grinned devilishly, and a moment later stood up, lifting you with his one arm. The pleasure you felt suddenly dissolved in your belly, warmth quickly disappearing, and a faint growl escaped your lips.

He chuckled, feeling a disappointment coming from your clenched cunt. "Don't complain, brat. I'm gonna stretch this cunt till you'll beg for me to stop."

He moved swiftly, walking his monstrous figure through the empty halls of the temple, with your body hanging off his shoulder and beefy arm keeping you in place. Torches licked your damp bodies, water trickling down from your fingers, droplets moving between the muscles of his back, carving roads, down till meaty thighs. You wriggled on his shoulder, till he finally placed his palm in front of your soaked cunt, smaller tongue rippling your folds once again.

"Such a needy slut, aren't you?" he grumbled, hand moving closer, with wet lips sucking on your pudgy, exposed clit. "No one ever taught you to be patient? I'll fuck this bratiness out of you."

You could only mewl and soften on his shoulder, legs slightly widening, fingers curling at the feel of this warmth coiling in your belly once again. Seconds later, your back landed on a soft mattress, with clean beddings hugging your naked body, cushions put under your hips, lifting them up up for Sukuna's heated look.

His sanity was hanging by a thread, eyes taking in the plumpness of your thighs, slick dripping down the mattress, knees slightly pushed against your chest, giving him a perfect look at your cunt flapping around nothing. He pushed one finger in, and it sucked him right away, as if in hunger and despair.

"Mhmmm, my God," you whimpered, keeping your legs open, wriggling under the crimson stare of his squinted eyes. "P-please–"

"Please, what? Do you even know what you're asking for?" He spat, a heavy glob leaking directly on your pulsing cunt, melting under the gentle curls of his thumb on your clit.

"P-please put them i-in," your small hands wrapped around his two cocks, putting them riiiight on your shaking belly.

Saying they were massive would be an understatement.

Monstrous? Yes, more like it.

More red than Sukuna's eyes, leaking with sticky precum right on your skin, the sheer length allowing them to go inside your womb straight away, maybe even up to your belly button. Veins curled around both shafts, and it seemed to Sukuna that you were too lost in pleasure to think about them with a sober mind. Because even he started to wonder where all this courage and sluttiness of yours suddenly came from, with little fingers grasping his cocks and gently swiping their feverish heads.

"Want it inside," you whined, cunt still leaking over his single finger already too fat for your clenching walls.

But Sukuna wasn't known for patience or mercy, being a rather brute God from whom female deities tried to stay away. For he never took a wife and used women only to meet his needs. Stories slipping from his chambers always involved a bit of violence and blood, as not one woman was able to withstand his ruthlessness.

It seemed, however, that with you it was different. Felt different. He couldn't really describe this sense, but he wished to give you pleasure only, worship your body till it'll melt under his touch, stuff you full of his cocks and move them gently along your clenching walls, watching the little tears dripping down your chin and enjoying short cries filling his chamber.

And when you spat on your hand, smearing it all over one of his reddened heads, something cracked.

He moved his cocks to your entrance, firstly pushing one. Cruelly. The first stretch felt absolutely brutal, with his wetted shaft going slowly through your walls, pushing against your muscles to let them fit its heaviness.

"N-no, I t-take it back!" You moaned, filling the fatness of his girth filling solely your entrance.

He didn't wait for a second one, because quite soon you felt its head hooking on your hole, stretching your cunt even wider, nasty, with your muscles pounding and head spinning. Black dots started to slowly cover your sight, head lulled back, hands on his belly, trying to push him away. "M-my God, p-please s-slower."

"I can't go any fucking slower," he barked, and you indeed noticed a droplet of sweat forming on his temple. Eyes closed, brows creased, all four arms quivered, when he glued your knees to your chest, pushing allll of his massive body on your weak figure. "Just endure it, fuck. It's gonna get better."

But in fact – it didn't.

At least for a while, because your poor hole took him in raw and needy, with new slick forming around his shaft and soaking it sweetly. His sun-kissed skin glowed under the gentle flames of candles, gaze focused solely on your fluttering hole, with creamy cum looking so delicious, his lower mouth opened once again. Its long tongue started off your pulsing clit, slowly going down to your plugged hole and licking it gently, to give his cocks even more slippery.

Breath knocked out of your lungs, throat tensed when he moved, forcing himself even farther. Seeing how difficult it was for you, with little hiccups melting with moans, his hand cupped your chin, crimson eyes meeting yours.

"Breath, brat. If you want to take them, breathe. That's right, go on, my good fucking girl," he talked you through it, following your slowly rising and falling chest, teary eyes glancing at him with a fever, and hands, slowly, slowly, tangling around his neck. "You're doing so good, so fucking good. Try to relax a bit, because your sweet cunt will cut my dicks off any second."

You purred, feeling his tongue on your neck, teeth grazing your jaw, cocks ripping you raw.

He pushed, with a filthy squelch, till you cried pitifully and clenched on his cocks again, feeling him forcing his way through the tight ring of your muscles. The tear felt delicious, and a fiery pain suddenly disappeared when his shafts kissed your cervix. Mouth on his belly was still working on your pudgy clit, sucking, licking, mewling it, till a shiver went down your spine and head tilted back.

"You see, it wasn't that hard, right?"

"Mhmm m-my God," you bubbled, mind stuppidly foggy.

"You're so tight, fuck. Never had a cunt like this," he licked the skin of your neck, smooched your cheeks, till his lips finally met with yours, eating all the little moans that fled them.

But when his balls finally met with your ass, full cocks placed heavily inside your cunt, he backed off.

Straightened, upper hands pushing the back of your thighs, lower hands on your waist, gripping tight. He was monstrous, towering, with a chest rising heavily, crimson eyes looking down at you with a madness.

"My God?" you asked nervously, seeing the crafty grin that suddenly arose on his face.

"I tried to be gentle, you know?"

Oh.

"It's your first time, right?" he pulled out, viciously, till nothing but tips sat tightly in your cunt.

"But now that you're stretched, I can finally fuck you fully. Don't you agree?"

"W-wait–"

But before you could protest, his hips buckled quickly, brutally, stuffing you with a single move. It was too much, with his cocks almost in your lungs, pressing your belly, filling its little pouch. Breath suddenly stuck in your throat, fresh tears trickling down your cheeks, when the tongue of his belly licked your clit, filthy.

"That's it," he groaned, head lulled back as he took the full pleasure of your walls clamping on his cocks and cervix already swollen from his furious strokes. "That's the pussy I'll kill for, fucking hell," His gaze dropped at you – your pudgy lips, with a saliva dripping down its corners, crossed eyes, and blush spreading all over your chest. "I'm gonna move baby, and you'll take it like a good slut, hm? Gonna stuff you full with my cum till you'll feel it right here," he pressed the bulging pouch on your belly, touching his pulsing heads right through your skin.

And you truly couldn't do anything else than just nod, as he once again pulled out and sank deep with balls hitting your ass, setting the brutal pace, pumping pumping pumping your pussy with his fat griths, smiling slyly upon hearing blubbered moans pushing from your throat.

He truly was cruel, sucking on your clit relentlessly, licking your burning hole sweetly. One hand cupped your jaw, smearing the salty tears all over it, forcing you to look straight into his bloody eyes.

And nothing turned him on more than a gentle melody of your cries and this timid gaze, making his cocks tremble in excitement.

Nothing but filthy squelch squelch squelch was filling his chamber, with you bent in cruel mating press, ass up, slick dripping down your cunt, both cocks splitting you open.

"Such a filthy girl," he growled, thrusting faster, harder, crimson eyes taking in all of your frowns and mewls. "So fucking tight, my sweet cunt. Swallowing me up so obediently, like a good wife you'll be."

You took him inch by inch, every thrust, every shiver, your walls clamping on him feverishly, drenching his shafts in new portions of creamy cum. Moans became so high, he needed to shut you up with a kiss, messy and nasty, kissing, licking your lips, drinking the lovely tune of your voice with a tremble.

"M-my God it feels sooo good, mhmm," you mewled, trying to melt your hand with his fingers, but he gripped your wrists and placed them over your head.

And then you felt it – this warmth coiling in your belly, hitched breath, shortened moand and back arching slightly together with his brutal thrusts and obscene moans.

You were close. So, so close. Gripping him wildly, meeting his thrusts with a frenetic move of your hips, going insane from his lower mouth running mean circles on your clit. The pleasure was maddening, the chamber filled with nothing but filthy slapping of his cocks and his growls, going deep down your throat.

"Ngh, m-my God, I'm g-gonna," you babbled, his true name slipping up between your heavy breath and wet moans.

"I know, brat. Come on, cum for me, let me fill you up sweetly," you nodded, his lips turning in grin. "Such a good fucking girl, my slutty queen, so hungry for my cum, hm? Come on, let me fuck you full and pregnant, fill this heavy tits with milk," your eyes crossed, head lolled back, globs of spit trickled from your lips.

You screamed, convulsed, rolled your hips against his, feeling every tremble, every vein of his sizzling shafts. He pounded you like a madman, pressing his monstrous body against yours, cocks sinking balls deep, kissing your pounding womb with each thrust.

High moan escaped your throat as he worked his way inside you, moulding your walls just to fit his beastly size. Hips jerking, thighs shaking as you felt the warmth in your belly finally spill, clit pulsing under Sukuna's wet tongue, drenching his abdomen mouth with your juices, as it swallowed them hungrily with a final lick.

Sukuna finally stilled, fat heads pushed against your womb, hot cum spilling right inside as he shuddered and pressed your body. It was raw, rough, with a growl that bubbled in his throat and lips kissing your cheeks, trying to distract you from the sheer amount of white ropes he was filling you with, with pulsing cocks and meaty tongue circling your plump clit. "Take it, baby, take it all like my good slutty goddess." He clenched fingers on your jaw, crimson eyes staring right into your. "And now, brat, you'll serve obediently as a queen and will stay the fuck away from the throne."

The room felt messy, filthy, with only your faint cries and a raw hole stretched around his softening cocks. He laid down, pinkish hair on your chest, rutting slowly, just to keep your cunt warm and gluey.

He felt heavy, sweaty, all four arms caging your in a tight embrace, lips twirling around your perked nipples as he mumbled maddly under his nose. He definitely fucked your brains out, but it seemed like the God of War himself was, too, totally and completely down on his knees for this sweet little goddess.

"My God," you mumbled sweetly, fingers going through his pinkish strands. "It seems like you keep forgetting your weight. My breasts–"

Sukuna growled, turning you both swiftly, till your head hit his broad chest, cocks still deep inside your pulsing cunt.

"Better?" he asked, a hint of amusment coilining in his voice, with arms wrapping around your sweaty back.

You only nodded, splaying comfortably on his body.

And how shocked the council was when, on the fourth day, none of the contestants appeared before the Ennead.

All eight gods waited.

Silence stretched long across the marble court, heavy as a coming storm. Incense burned low. The sun climbed higher. Still, no sign of either of you.

Maat, ever watchful, sent a servant to check the chambers, fearing perhaps that a lesser goddess had already fallen prey to a brute’s temper. Whispers coiled between the pillars like snakes. Your mother sat rigid upon her golden throne, fingers crumpling the white silk of her robes, eyes dark with worry she tried, and failed, to conceal.

The servant returned pale, whispering to Maat's ear carefully.

Her face changed – annoyance, curiosity, shock!

"Oh?" Ra chuckled, seeing the deep breath escaping Maat's lips.

She cleared her throat, voice high and steady, as she announced the information.

"Her Goddess Horus and God Set decided to... share the rule over Egypt, by joining in wedlock. Moreover, it seems that Goddess Horus has been..." she stopped, as if gathering thoughts. "Tainted, and thus her status doesn't allow her to become the sole ruler. That's the final decision, and that's what council of Ennead should approve."

And after the small chaos caused by the fainting of Goddess Isis, they approved indeed.

I don't know why, but it was so hard to write! Btw, the thing with semen is real, and in real contendings of Horus and Set, they tried to mark themselves with their semen. At one point, Horus even cummed on a salad and tried to give it to Set.