RumpleStoleMySkin

That's the thing you still can't quite get used to. The hum is different here. Not the flat, fluorescent drone of Level 0's hallways, that ambient pressure that sits on your skin like a low-grade headache. This is warmer. Rounder. A sustained note that lives in the walls the way heat lives in a radiator, and it fills the rooms, plural, with doors and corners and a kitchen with a window that faces a corridor that BB has done something to. 

Strange and inhuman, so that the light that comes through the glass looks like late afternoon in the Santa Clara Valley, even though there is no afternoon here and no valley and no sun.

BB built this for you.

A hallway that hadn't existed. A doorway where a wall once stood. He carved a sublevel out of Level 0, the way you'd carve a space inside a block of wood, and what emerged was this: an apartment. Your apartment. Not a copy, not the uncanny almost-right, but a reconstruction built from the details he absorbed through the wall over months of listening and your own memories. The layout of the kitchen. The position of the bookshelves. The height of the counter where you used to lean while Bobby stood at the sink.

It's not identical. It can't be. Some details Backrooms can’t render right, some he interpreted rather than reproduced, and there are places where his understanding of home and yours diverge in ways that are quietly alien. The windows don't open. The bathroom has no mirror. The bookshelves are organised by colour, the way you described to him once, and seeing your preference rendered in physical space by something that remembered a passing comment had made your throat tight in a way you couldn't name.

He started building it after the agents.

You don't like thinking about the attack. Your body remembers it better than your mind does. 

You remember the impact. The floor. A pressure on your chest that felt unbearable, like the air itself had solidified, and a pain in your shoulder that burned white and erased thought. You remember voices—clipped, tactical, coordinated, the language of people who had trained for this—and then BB's arrival.

You don't remember what happened to the agents. BB recounted what happened later, in clipped sentences, his jaw tight, his eyes carrying a darkness that took hours to fully recede, that there had been six. Human. Armed. Organised in a way that suggested training and resources, and a purpose that went beyond casual exploration. The encounter had been resolved.

He didn't elaborate on resolved. You didn't ask.

After that, BB locked Level 0 down. You felt it happen even as you clung to him after the attack, a shift in the hum, a tightening, like a fist closing around the entire level. 

The corridors that used to carry the occasional lost wanderer, the stray explorer who stumbled in from Level 1 and stumbled out again, are now sealed. Thresholds that had been porous became walls. Doors that had been doors became surfaces. BB walked the perimeter for three days straight, and when he came back, his eyes were fully black, and the warmth took a long time to return, and the message was absolute: nothing gets in. 

Nothing human, nothing inhuman, nothing with a weapon and a tactical vocabulary and the coordinates to find the corridor where you bled on the floor. Level 0 was his. Level 0 was yours. And the only things moving through it now were the two of you and the hum and whatever BB decided to allow, which was nothing, which was no one, which was the total and permanent closure of a territory around the person inside it.

You healed. Your lip closed over, your bruises receded. BB fussed over you, his face tight with concentration that you gradually recognised as fear. Not fear of the wound. Fear of what the wound meant. That you could be reached. That the corridors he'd taught you to walk and the levels he'd shown you and the notebook full of careful shorthand hadn't been enough to keep a human with a weapon from putting you on the ground in a place he'd told you was safe.

He'd been different since. Not colder, exactly, the warmth was still there, the hand on yours, the chin on your shoulder while you sketched. But warier. His attention, already vast, had developed a new layer, a peripheral vigilance that never fully shut off, a constant low-level scanning that you could feel the way you felt the hum. 

He checked the corridors before you entered them now. He checked rooms you'd been in a hundred times. And he'd built this place—the sublevel, the apartment, the nest within the nest—and the message was clear even if he never said it aloud. Deeper. More hidden. Harder to reach. A space carved into the architecture of Level 0 itself, tucked beneath his territory the way a vital organ sits beneath the ribs.

You've been here a while. 

Long enough that the first notebook is full and the second is two-thirds gone and the third is waiting on the shelf BB just stacked, its mottled cover still crisp. 

Long enough that you've mapped Level 0 in its entirety, or as close to entirety as a place like this gets, and made partial notes on multiple other levels. Some detailed, some no more than a page of warnings and a rough sketch. It’s been long enough that your handwriting has changed. Gotten smaller, tighter, more efficient, conserving space the way you conserve everything here. 

And long enough that the thing on the perimeter has become a permanent entry in the notebook. Updated weekly, the symbol you invented for it—a circle with a line bisecting it, unknown entity, behaviour unclassified—appearing on more pages than any other annotation.

It's still circling. Still testing. Running its vast, patient intelligence along the boundary of BB's territory and pulling back before contact. You've taken to calling it Entity X in your notes permanently, a placeholder designation, because giving it a real name would make it more solid, and it's already solid enough. 

You can feel it sometimes. Not the way you feel the hum or BB's presence, but as an absence, a hot spot at the edge of perception, like turning your head toward a sound that stopped just before you heard it.

BB doesn't talk about it.

That's how you know it's bad. BB talks about Smilers with contempt and Howlers with mild annoyance, and the locked-down perimeter with the grim satisfaction of a thing that sealed its borders and dares anything to test them. He talks about the agents with a clipped exactness that betrays how much it shook him. 

But Entity X gets silence. Gets the jaw-tightening. Gets the moments you've started cataloguing in a private section of the notebook that you don't label. The mornings when he's already awake when you surface, sitting at the edge of the nest with his posture too rigid and his eyes too dark, focused on a distance you can't perceive. The nights he disappears and comes back with the face not quite set, the edges sharp, the wet-paint quality that means he dropped Bobby to deal with whatever he found and hasn't fully climbed back in yet. He smooths over it. Deflects. Does the half-grin and the shrug and the it's handled that you've learned to read as I don't want you to carry this.

You let him think it works. You watch him reassemble his composure over breakfast, and you don't push. You don't pry. You simply add another entry to the private section, which is getting longer. The circle-with-a-line symbol fills the margins like a recurring dream.

Long enough that the thought of leaving has shifted from a wound to a question.

You think about it. Still. Not every day—not the way you did in the beginning, when it was a constant screaming pressure behind your ribs—but in the quiet moments, the ones between mapping and walking and BB's hand on yours. In the pauses. You'll be sketching a corridor junction, and your pen will stop, and you'll look at the lines on the page and think: I could navigate this now. 

Not all of it. Not the deep levels, not the places BB won't take you. But the paths between 0 and 1, between 1 and the threshold levels, the routes that thread through the safer territories. You know them. You've walked them, mapped them in your own shorthand and committed the landmarks to memory. You’re no longer the woman who fell through a wall and couldn't find her way back. You could find your way back. Probably. If you wanted to.

If you wanted to.

The if is the problem.

The if sits in your chest like a stone, and you can feel its weight when you breathe, and you don't examine it too closely because examining it means confronting what's underneath. That the woman who fell through the wall wanted to go home with a desperation that burned, and the woman standing in a reconstructed kitchen organising shelves with an ancient entity is not sure she does anymore. Not because home stopped mattering. Because here started mattering too.

You feel loved here.

The admission lives in the back of your skull like a low-grade fever, always present, never quite articulated. 

You feel loved. BB needed you before he loved you, or whatever the equivalent is for a being that predates human emotional language. But loved, in the clear, daily, accumulative way that love manifests when it's not grand gestures and declarations but shared laughter and proximity and a hand that finds yours in the dark without being asked. BB loves you pervasively, from every direction at once. And you’ve started to love him back, and the loving feels like betrayal, and the betrayal feels like breathing, and you can't tell anymore which one you're supposed to stop.

It's selfish. You know it's selfish. Somewhere on the other side of the wall there's a world you belonged to, a life with your name on it, and you're standing in a facsimile kitchen letting an inhuman thing shelve your notebooks and you're happy, or close enough to happy that the difference doesn't register, and the selfishness of that—choosing comfort over confrontation, choosing the being who stayed over the man you'd have to face—sits in your stomach like acid.

You don't say any of this. You lean against the kitchen counter, and you watch him arrange the shelf and try not to notice the tension he thinks he's hiding.

It's in his hands. The notebooks are stacked neatly, but his fingers linger on each spine a fraction too long before releasing, and there's a quality to BB’s movements—too measured, too controlled—that you've learned to recognise as the aftermath of a bad patrol. 

He'd been out this morning. Before you woke. You'd surfaced to find the nest empty, and you'd lain there tracing the impression of his body in the fabric and counting the minutes until the hallway produced him again. And when it did, his face was smooth, and his smile was easy. He'd said morning, baby with the half-grin. You'd said morning, and neither of you mentioned that his eyes were still a shade too dark, that the blue was slow in rising, that whatever he'd encountered at the perimeter was still sitting behind his expression like sediment that hadn't fully settled.

He's protecting you from it. The way he shields you from the worst of the corridor checks, the way he smooths Entity X into a vague it's fine, it's the same, nothing's changed whenever you ask directly. He carries it alone because carrying it is what he does, because shielding you is coded into whatever he is at a level deeper than the face, and the tenderness of that instinct and the frustration of being managed by it exist in equal measure inside your chest.

You watch his hands on the shelf. You watch the tension he thinks is invisible. 

The hum holds you both in its warm, low frequency, and somewhere from the apartment, the music starts.

A crackle of static first, the particular pop and hiss of a record that's been played too many times, and then the melody. Slow. Sweet. Old in a way that feels intentional, like the Backrooms reached into the past and pulled out the exact song designed to make your chest ache.

We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when—

Vera Lynn. The voice is warm and rounded and impossibly clear for a moment, every note landing clean, and then the Backrooms stutter—a glitch, a skip, the audio hiccupping like a record needle jumping a groove—and the word when stretches, distorts, hangs in the air a fraction too long before the melody catches up to itself and continues.

—but I know we'll meet again some sunny day—

Another glitch. The word sunny fractures, splits into overlapping copies of itself that pile up for half a second (sunny sunny sun-n-ny) and then resolves, the song smoothing back out like water closing over a dropped stone. The crackle persists underneath. A warmth to the distortion, like listening to a broadcast from very far away, like the song is travelling through miles of wall and wire and yellow to reach you.

You go still.

Your hand rests on the counter. The song fills the apartment, and you feel yourself drift. Not physically. Internally. The song pulls at the room in the back of your chest, the one where the Thursday morning lives, the one where Bobby said stay and the sheets were gold, and the phone rang, and he ignored it because his mouth was on yours.

Keep smiling through, just like you always do—

A skip. Always repeats, layers, becomes a brief chorus of itself before the record unsticks and Vera Lynn carries on, serene, unruffled, singing about reunion to a woman standing in a place where reunion might be impossible.

You stare at the window. The fake Santa Clara light falls across your hands on the counter, and it's warm, it's exactly the right warmth, and the song is playing, and you are thinking about the front door of your real apartment, the one with the sticky lock that Bobby always meant to fix. The sound your keys made when you set them on the table by the door. Whether anyone has fixed the lock since you've been gone, or whether it's still sticky, waiting for your hand on the knob, waiting for you to come home and jiggle it the way only you knew how—

“Hey.”

BB's voice. Close. You blink. He's in front of you—when did he move?—and his head is tilted, his eyes searching your face. That total-attention read, line by line. He sees where you went. He always sees it. He can track the exact moment your gaze goes internal, the instant when the woman in front of him leaves the room, and the woman who misses Bobby takes her place.

He doesn't ask. He doesn't say are you thinking about him or do you want to talk about it or are you okay. He does something else instead.

He holds out his hand.

Palm up. Fingers open. The same gesture he made at the old nest, except the context has shifted, the weight of it is different now, heavier, more layered. 

His eyes are warm, and his mouth is soft. Vera Lynn sings through the walls and glitching on the word again (a-a-again), and BB stands in a kitchen he built for you with his hand extended, and the look on his face says come here, come back, I know where you just went, and you don't have to stay there.

You seize his hand in yours.

He pulls you in. Gently. Your chest against his. His hand settles at the small of your back. Low, warm, the heel of his palm resting against the base of your spine, and his other hand keeps yours, lifting it, positioning your joined hands at shoulder height, the way you showed him.

You've been teaching BB to dance.

It started as a joke, a throwaway comment about how Bobby had two left feet and you'd tried to teach him once. He'd stepped on your toes, called dancing vertical suffering, and refused to try again. 

BB had tilted his head. Asked questions. And the next evening, he'd stood in the middle of the living room with his arms stiff and his weight wrong and said show me, and you'd laughed but taken his hands and spent an hour teaching him a basic box step while he moved with the mechanical precision of something that had studied human motion extensively and participated in it never.

He's better now. Not fluid, not quite natural, still carrying that faint quality in his movements, the angles a half-degree too clean, but better. He can hold the frame. He can follow the tempo. Can move you through the small kitchen space without stepping on your feet.

'Til the blue skies drive the dark clouds far away —

The song glitches. Dark clouds becomes d-dark cl-clouds, a stutter that sounds like the record is caught in a groove, cycling, and then it releases, and the melody continues, and BB turns you slowly in the kitchen light.

You look up at him.

He's looking down at you. Bobby's face, close, the chain at his throat catching the warm not-sunlight, the earring a small bright point at the edge of your vision. His expression is—

You've run out of words for BB's expressions. The early ones had names: Bobby's grin, Bobby's smirk, Bobby's mock-wounded outrage. But BB has been building his own vocabulary of expressions on top of Bobby's, small deviations from the blueprint, micro-adjustments that belong to him and only him, and the one on his face right now is entirely his.

He smiles at you.

Small. Crooked. Genuine.

Bobby's grin was a performance, a weapon, a thing deployed with intent. This is quieter. Lopsided. One corner of his mouth lifting slightly higher than the other, the asymmetry creating warmth. It's the smile of a thing that learned to smile by watching a man smile and then, slowly, over months, forgot to copy and started to mean it.

You gaze at each other.

BB's hand is warm at your back, and your hand is in his, and you're standing close enough that you can see the individual lashes framing his eyes, dark against the blue, and the small scar on his jaw, and the way the not-sunlight catches the fine grain of his skin. Which is perfect. Which is too perfect, and has no imperfections except the ones he chose to replicate, and even those are too intentional, the blemishes of a face that was designed rather than grown.

You should look away. The tension is building in the space between your bodies the way static builds before a storm, and you should look away because looking at BB like this, in this light, with this song, is a door you're not sure you can close once you walk through it.

You don't look away.

BB's gaze drops.

To your mouth.

It's not subtle because BB doesn't do subtle. His eyes fix on your lips and stay there, and you can feel the weight of it, the physical pressure of being looked at that intently by something that ancient. Like a beam of light concentrated through a lens until it burns.

His breathing changes.

He doesn't need to breathe. You know this. You've known it for a while. The breathing is performance, a courtesy, a piece of the human costume he maintains because the alternative would unsettle you. But right now, in the kitchen, with his eyes on your mouth and the song glitching softly around you (we'll meet a-a-again), his chest expands and contracts, the air leaving him in a slow, uneven exhale, pushed out rather than released. Like whatever is happening inside him right now is too large for the shape to hold without venting pressure.

“Can I—” he starts.

Stops.

BB’s jaw twitches, that muscle at the hinge. His eyes are still on your mouth, and his hand tightens at your back. A fraction, barely perceptible, his fingers pressing into the fabric of your shirt, and his throat moves. A swallow. Another borrowed gesture, another piece of human machinery he doesn't need, except right now it looks involuntary. It looks real.

“Can I,” he rasps again, even quieter. 

His voice has dropped into that low register, the one that carries the hum's harmonic underneath it. Not the ancient-thing voice. Or the vast, reverberating frequency he uses when something threatens his territory. This is… smaller. Almost shy. A resonance that sounds like it's coming from a place BB didn't know he had.

He trails off.

The kitchen is quiet. Vera Lynn has gone silent. The song caught in a glitch, a held note, the record spinning in a groove that won't release. Only sounds are the hum, BB's unnecessary breathing, and your own heartbeat, too loud in your ears.

"What do you want?" you ask, barely above a whisper. 

You can feel the tension in him through your palm on his shoulder. Not the coiled readiness he carries in dangerous corridors. A different kind. A vibration, running through the muscle and bone of a body that is not muscle and bone. That is something else entirely, wearing the shape of a man who is shaking because he wants something and doesn't know how to take it without being taught.

BB makes a sound.

Low. At the back of his throat. A sound that lives in the space between a groan and a hum, that carries a wanting so raw it barely fits through his vocal cords. Throaty. Needy. And underneath it—beneath the borrowed voice, beneath Bobby's timbre and the human costume—a vibration that is entirely and unmistakably other. Primal. 

His hand lifts from between your bodies. Unsure. His fingers drift upward, and his thumb finds your mouth. Presses against the swell of your bottom lip. Gentle. Barely there. The pad of his thumb traces the curve of it the way he traces the edge of a doorway when he's reading a room, with that same focused attention, that same reverent precision.

“A kiss,” he whispers.

His eyes lift from your mouth to your eyes. His thumb stays on your lip. The wanting on his face is so naked, so unperformed, so completely stripped of Bobby's armour and BB's composure that it makes your breath catch. 

“You taught me to dance,” he goes on, the words coming out unevenly. Hushed. His thumb moves against your lip, the faintest drag, back and forth, and his eyes are dark and wide. The ancient thing behind them is nowhere to be seen. What's looking at you is just BB, just the being you named in a meadow, wanting something human with a desperation that borders on heartbreaking. “Teach me this. Teach me how to—” His breath shudders. Not a performance, a malfunction. A system overwhelmed. “How to do it right. I want to do it right. For you.”

Your breath hitches.

The conflict is a living thing in your chest,  a creature with teeth and a heartbeat, pulling in two directions at once. 

Bobby's mouth on yours on a sunny morning. BB's thumb on your lip in a kitchen that shouldn't exist. The man who kissed you like he invented it, and the being who is asking permission to learn how to. The love you carried through the wall and the love that grew on this side of it, stubborn and impossible and real, and the guilt, the guilt, the guilt that says this is betrayal and the counter-voice that hisses betrayal of what? Of a man who grunted at your goodbye? Of a love that was already starving when you left?

You want this.

The wanting is its own answer. It sits in your stomach, hot and undeniable, and it doesn't care about the guilt, and it doesn't care about the conflict. It doesn't care that the mouth hovering near yours belongs to a thing that heard you through concrete and chose to wear the face of the man who broke your heart. 

You want this. You want him. BB. Not the face, or the copy, not the better version of someone else, but the thing underneath. The one who learned your name, kept your promise, built you a kitchen, and is standing in it now with his thumb on your lip, his body shaking, the word please forming on his tongue.

“Please,” he breathes, his thumb dragging across your bottom lip one more time. Feather-light. And his face is so soft, so open, so wrecked with the rawness of wanting something he's never had that the word comes out like a prayer. "Please."

You don't stop him when he leans in.

His lips brush yours.

The lightest possible contact. The surface tension of a kiss, the moment before it becomes one, and the touch is tentative. So fragile, and so different from every kiss you've ever experienced that your body doesn't know how to categorise it. 

Bobby kissed like he was claiming, savouring. BB kisses like he's asking, begging. His mouth hovers against yours, barely touching, a question held in the millimetre of space between his skin and yours, and you can feel the tremor in his lips. He's shaking. Fine, continuous, a vibration that you feel more than see, and his breath—the breath he doesn't need—washes over your mouth in a warm, unsteady exhale.

Then the contact lands. Full. His lips press to yours, and the sensation is—

Heat.

Beyond warmth, beyond the gentle building of a slow kiss. A current that slams through your entire system, starting at the point of contact and radiating outward through your jaw, your throat, your chest, and the base of your spine. It's not natural, it can't be natural, because the body against yours is not a body and the mouth on yours is not a mouth, not really. It's the surface expression of something vast and old and powerful, and that power is in the kiss, threaded through it like voltage through copper, and your nervous system lights up like a circuit completing.

BB is worse.

You feel it happen. His skin, always cool, always that slightly-below-human temperature that you've gotten used to, goes hot. A flush of warmth that starts at his mouth and spreads, radiant, through his jaw and his neck and the hands on your body. His cool skin warms beneath your lips like metal left in the sun. Like the contact between your mouth and his is generating a heat that his body was never designed to process.

He makes a sound against your mouth. Soft. Greedy. A small, desperate noise that vibrates between your lips, and he can't stop it. You can tell. Because you can feel the way his jaw tightens and his breath catches. Like he's trying to contain it and failing, the sound escaping anyway, involuntary, the noise of someone encountering sensation for the first time and being unmade by it.

You tilt your head. Change the angle. Show him.

He follows. Quick, eager, that same devouring attentiveness he brings to every lesson. Your angle becomes his angle, your pressure becomes his pressure, and the speed at which BB adapts is inhuman. Seconds instead of minutes, the learning curve of a thing that absorbs information through contact. 

Your lips part, just barely, and his mirrors the movement, and the kiss deepens, and BB's hand slides up your back and grips, bunching the fabric of your shirt between his fingers. The sound he makes this time is louder. A sigh that cracks open midway through and becomes a groan, low and shaking, shot through with that sub-harmonic frequency that you feel in your teeth.

His other hand finds the side of your face, cups your jaw. His thumb traces your cheekbone, and his mouth moves against yours. He's learning. You can feel him learning, cataloguing each shift in pressure, each tilt, each breath, mapping this the way you mapped his corridors, with hunger and the desperate focus.

You run your fingers through his hair. BB shudders. A full-body tremor, head to feet, and the sound he makes is a wrecked, bitten-off thing that lives somewhere between a gasp and a whimper, and his forehead drops against yours, and his mouth chases yours, his fingers tightening in your shirt.

When you finally part, his mouth follows yours. An inch. Reluctant. Not wanting the distance.

His forehead rests against yours. His breathing is ragged. Unnecessary, performative, and completely out of his control, great shuddering exhales that fog the negligible space between your faces. His eyes are closed. The lashes dark against his flushed skin, which is still warm, still radiating that unnatural heat, and his lips are parted, and his expression is—

Ruined. That's the word. He looks ruined. Taken apart at the joints and not yet reassembled. Every layer of composure stripped away. Bobby's armour, BB's own careful vaneer, the ancient thing's vast indifference. All of it gone, peeled back, and what's underneath is just this: a being, shaking, in a kitchen, with the taste of you on a mouth he built to say your name.

“Am I doing it right?” he whispers shakily, slightly dazed. “Was that good?”

His eyes open. Find yours. And the expression in them is so earnest. So genuinely concerned that the answer might be no, that he might have gotten it wrong. That the thing he wants more than anything he's ever wanted might be the thing he's worst at, that your chest cracks along an old fault line, warmth flooding in.

You smile. Your nose bumps his.

“You're a very eager student,” you murmur, your voice thick. Roughened. 

The heat still sits in your veins, humming through the places where his mouth was, and the words come out low and warm but certain.

BB's face transforms.

The worry dissolves. What replaces it is satisfaction. Feline. Deep. The slow, spreading pleasure of a thing that’s been told it succeeded at the one task it cared about. And the expression settles onto Bobby's features in a way that is entirely BB's. Not the cocky grin, but quieter, more private, enormously pleased, a contentment so total it rearranges his face into a shape Bobby never wore.

He leans in. Presses his lips to your forehead.

Gentle. Unhurried, lingering. His mouth is warm against your skin, and you feel the hum transfer through the contact. That low, steady vibration, his frequency, the sound that lives in his chest and translates through his mouth into a pulse that settles behind your sternum like a second heartbeat. 

He holds the kiss there. Two seconds. Three. His hand cradling the back of your head, his fingers in your hair, and the gesture is so tender and so completely his that the breath leaves your body in a long, slow exhale.

You close your eyes. Lean into it.

Bobby never used to kiss your forehead.

Bobby kissed your mouth, your neck, the spot below your ear that made you gasp. Bobby kissed with intent, heat, and skill. Bobby kissed like a man who knew exactly what he was doing and wanted you to know he knew. 

But the forehead—that quiet, unhurried, undemanding press of lips to the place above your eyes—that was never in Bobby's vocabulary. 

It was too tender. Too unperformative. Too much like a devotion and not enough like a statement. Bobby declared. And the soft devotional gesture of forehead to forehead, mouth to brow, the kiss that says I cherish you instead of I want you—that was always one of the doors Bobby bricked up, one of the tender things he couldn't do because doing it would've meant admitting the size of what he felt, and Bobby's whole life was an exercise in pretending the feeling was smaller than the room.

Vera Lynn unsticks from her glitch, and the last notes of the song drift through the apartment like smoke (some sunny d-day), and you are here. In a kitchen that was built for you by something that heard you cry through a wall. 

You lean into lips gentle against your skin and close your eyes. 

BB pauses at the threshold of the apartment.

He does this now, the pause, the backward glance, the half-second where his body is already oriented toward the corridor but his attention is still tethered to you. 

It started after the first kiss. A new subroutine in him, a step added to the departure sequence that wasn't there before, and you've watched it develop over the past few days.

“Perimeter check,” he calls out casually. The half-grin flashes. “Back soon.”

You cross the kitchen, pressing your lips to his cheek. A quick, light contact, the kind of kiss that says be safe without saying it.

BB's hand catches your chin.

His fingers close around it,, his thumb and forefinger framing your jaw the way he'd frame a shot if he were Bobby, if he had a camera, if the instinct that lives in those borrowed hands were pointed at a lens instead of at your face. He tilts your head. Tips it up. Holds you exactly where he wants you.

And he kisses you.

Full, wet, unhurried, his lips parting against yours with a confidence he didn't have two days ago in the kitchen. He's been learning, replaying, refining, the way he refines everything, and the kiss he gives you now is deeper than the first, more certain, carrying the heat that slammed through both of you the first time and has been simmering since, banked but not extinguished. His tongue brushes your lower lip. His fingers tighten on your chin. 

He makes that sound again. The low, needy one, the one that lives at the back of his throat with the purr, and he tries to swallow it, almost, but not quite.

BB pulls back. A centimetre, his mouth hovering.

“Was that okay?” he breathes out, his breath on your lips. His eyes search yours with that earnest, slightly worried focus. Still checking, treating every escalation like a threshold he needs your permission to cross.

You nod. You don't trust your voice. You stay close, your forehead almost touching his, breathing the same air, and the hum in the walls dips low and warm around you.

BB presses his lips to your forehead. Holds them there. 

"Stay," he murmurs against your skin.

Then he's gone. The hum adjusts, tightens, and you're alone in the apartment with the ghost of his mouth on your brow and the taste of him on your lips.

You decide to sort the nest to kill time.

It doesn't need sorting, really.

BB arranges it with a precision that borders on pedantic, the blankets layered in an exact order, the pillows positioned at angles he's adjusted over weeks of watching how you sleep. But your hands need occupation, and your brain needs distraction, because the kiss is still on your mouth, the taste is still there, and the wanting is a warm, heavy thing in the pit of your stomach. 

And if you don't move, don't work, don't put your hands on fabric and fold, you're going to lie down on this bed and think about his fingers on your chin and his tongue on your lip and the sound he made, and you can't afford to be that soft right now. Not while he's out there. Not while Entity X is out there.

You refold the top blanket. Smooth the creases. Adjust the pillow on the left side—your side, the one that holds the impression of your head—and reach for the second pillow, the one on BB's side that he doesn't need but uses because you told him beds have two pillows and he'd looked at you with that tilted curiosity and said why? and you'd said because that's how it works and he'd said that's not a reason and you'd said because it means someone else sleeps here too and he'd gone quiet for a long time and the next morning there were two pillows.

You're smoothing the second pillowcase when you hear it.

Your hand stills.

“—not about that, can you just—”

Your voice. Your own voice, coming from somewhere beyond the apartment walls, floating through the hum the way Vera Lynn had floated. Sourceless, directionless. Except this isn't music. This is you. A version of you from before, the you that existed on the other side of the wall, and the sound of your own voice reaching you from the yellow makes your blood slow in your veins.

“—I'm just asking if we're okay, Bobby, that's all I'm asking—”

And then his. Bobby's. The real Bobby, the original, the voice you haven't heard in— 

You don't know how long. Months. Maybe onger. And the sound of it hits you in the sternum like a fist because it's exactly the same, the same timbre and cadence, the same tired dismissive flatness that used to make the back of your throat burn.

“We're fine.”

Two words. Tossed over his shoulder. The verbal equivalent of a shrug, of a turned back, of a man already looking at the television while his girlfriend stands in the kitchen with her hands gripping the counter and her chest full of words she's running out of courage to say.

“You keep saying that, but you don't—Bobby, can you look at me? Can you just—”

“I am looking at you.”

“You're not. You're looking at the screen. I'm asking you to turn around and actually—”

“What do you want me to say?" And there it is—the edge. The blade that lives under the casual, the sharp thing that comes out when he feels cornered, when the conversation is moving toward a territory he doesn't want to enter. Not anger. Worse than anger. Impatience. A man who’s decided this conversation is unnecessary before it started. “We're fine, babe. I'm here. What else do you want?”

“I want you to talk to me—”

“I'm talking to you right now. Stop trying to turn this into a fight.”

“That's not—Bobby, that's not what I mean, and you know it.”

Silence of a man who’s already disengaged follows, who’s pulled the drawbridge up mid-conversation and is now sitting behind his own walls waiting for you to exhaust yourself against them. You know that silence. You lived inside that silence for months. You drowned in it.

You set the pillow down. Your hands are trembling.

You know you shouldn't. Your instincts are screaming loudly. The animal brain hisses warnings. The brain that’s spent months learning the rules of this place and the first rule, the foundational rule, the one BB drilled into you before he taught you anything else, is stay in the nest. Stay in the apartment. Stay inside the protection he carved for you out of Level 0's guts.

But your voice is out there. Bobby's voice is out there. And the sound of that exact conversation—that devastating, ordinary conversation, the kind you had a hundred times, the kind that ended with you staring at the ceiling at two AM—is pulling at you the way gravity pulls. 

Not curiosity. Recognition. The lure of an old wound being reopened.

You step out of the apartment.

The corridor beyond the front door is yellow. Long. The sublevel hallway that connects the apartment to the main body of Level 0, the passage BB carved like a throat between his territory and yours. 

The fluorescent lights buzz overhead in that flat shadowless drone, and the hum is steady, even, unchanged. Nothing looks wrong. Nothing feels wrong, except that your voice is coming from the far end of the corridor, from beyond the doorway where the sublevel opens into Level 0 proper, and the conversation is continuing, rolling forward, playing itself out like a recording that doesn't know it's being listened to.

“—I feel like you don't even notice if I'm here or not. Bobby, do you notice? Do you notice when I'm standing right in front of you?”

Your eyes burn. The lump in your throat is solid, immovable, sharp-edged. You walk toward the sound. One hand trails the wall, and your bare feet are silent on the carpet, and the conversation beyond pulls you forward step by step.

“You're being dramatic.”

The words hit you like a slap. Not because they're new. Because they're not. 

Bobby said that. Bobby said those exact words, in that same exact tone, with that exact tired, dismissive, I-don't-have-the-energy-for-this tone, and the accuracy of the reproduction makes your skin prickle because the Backrooms shouldn't have this. 

The Backrooms shouldn't have the argument you had on a random Tuesday in October in a kitchen in Santa Clara. The Backrooms shouldn't know what Bobby sounded like when he was making you feel invisible.

“I'm not being dramatic, I'm being honest, I'm trying to tell you that I'm hurting and you won't even—”

“Hurting from what? Babe, I don’t want to fight. Stop turning everything into an argument.” Bobby's voice, louder now. The edge hardens into a wall. “You want me to sit here and—what? Have a feelings conversation? I'm tired. I worked all day. Can we just—can we not?”

You stop at the doorway.

The sublevel opens into the corridor beyond. Level 0 proper, BB's territory, the locked-down hallways that nothing enters and nothing leaves. The lights stretch into the yellow distance. The carpet extends, flat and damp, into the dark. 

The conversation is louder here, bouncing off the walls, your voice and Bobby's voice layered on top of each other in a terrible intimacy, and your eyes are full, and the anger is back. The buried anger, the one BB identified months ago, the one you folded into self-doubt and swallowed. It's risen now, pulled to the surface by the sound of Bobby refusing, again, to try. To talk. To turn around and listen. 

To look at you, see you standing there with your heart in your hands, asking for the bare minimum, and be told you're being dramatic.

The doorway is empty.

Your voices continue, playing in the walls. But there's nothing there, just the corridor. More of the yellow, and the dark at the far end, where the lights don't reach. Where the fluorescents give way to a blackness that is too thick, too solid to be ordinary shadow.

You stare at the dark.

The dark stares back.

Your sweat goes cold. A full-body temperature drop, your skin prickling from scalp to ankles, every hair on your arms standing in unison, and the moisture on your palms turns to ice water, and your heartbeat detonates. Slams against the cage of your ribs so hard you feel it in your teeth. Once. Twice. A third time that shakes your vision.

The conversation stops.

Your voice. Bobby's voice. Gone. Cut off mid-sentence like a throat being closed, and the silence that replaces it is not Level 0's silence, not the hum-filled quiet of a place holding itself still. This is the absence of sound. The void where sound should be. A silence so complete it has its own pressure, pushing against your eardrums, filling your skull with a static that isn't static but attention. 

Vast, focused, oriented entirely on you.

The dark moves.

A motion that starts at the far end of the corridor and travels toward you with unhurried, deliberate patience, like whatever it is has all the time in the world and knows it. The fluorescent lights flicker (one, two, three in sequence), and when they reignite, they’re not yellow anymore.

They’re red.

A deep, arterial crimson that transforms the corridor into a visceral maw that looks less like a hallway and more like standing in the inside of a throat. The carpet darkens. The walls darken. Familiar geometry of Level 0 warps under the red light into a place you don't recognise, a version of BB's territory that has been flooded with something foreign, something that changes the colour of the air itself.

The lights flicker again. Red, black, red, black. A strobe, pulsing, each flash revealing the dark a little closer, a little more solid, a shape forming inside it the way a body forms inside smoke, and in the stuttering crimson you see it.

Your head tips up.

And up.

And up.

It comes into the red light the way a whale breaches water. Slowly, the sheer scale of it requiring a recalibration of your visual field that your brain refuses to perform.

Your legs won't move. Your body has locked up, every muscle seized in the ancient, primate, pre-verbal grip of a fear so total it bypasses the nervous system and goes straight to the marrow. 

This isn’t the Smiler or the Howler. This isn’t six agents with weapons and tactical vocabulary. This is the thing in the notebook. The symbol you drew on page after page, updating weekly, tracking its movements at the perimeter with clinical detachment because clinical detachment was the only way to hold it at arm's length.

It's not at the perimeter anymore.

It's tall. Obscenely, horrifically tall. Its body fills the corridor from floor to ceiling, which suddenly seems too low, its shape pressing against the walls as if the hallway were built around it, or as if it had grown to fill the hallway.

It's shaped wrong, proportioned wrong, only vaguely humanoid silhouette stretched to the breaking point and then stretched further, limbs too long, muscular, joints articulating at angles that make your eyes slide off them like water off glass.

Its skin is more like a hide. Leathery. Matte. A deep, dark red that absorbs the crimson light instead of reflecting it, like something that was red once and has since become a surface that eats light and gives nothing back. No texture. No sheen. The flat, dead finish of something organic that has forgotten how to be alive.

And it has no face.

The surface where a face should be is smooth. Featureless. A blank expanse of that matte leathery skin, curved slightly, like the inside of a mask, and the blankness is worse than any feature could be because your brain keeps trying to find the face, keeps scanning the surface for eyes, mouth, nose, any anchor of recognition, any sign that what you're looking at is a being and not a wall of skin that has learned to walk.

Then the eyes appear.

They don't open, they emerge. 

Bulging outward from the surface of the face, pressing through the skin like something hatching, the leathery hide stretching and thinning and splitting apart in wet, peeling seams, and what emerges is yellow. Burning, furnace-bright yellow, the colour of the fluorescent lights distilled and concentrated and superheated until it became something that hurts to look at. Two points of searing amber in the featureless red, and they fix on you.

They fix on you, and they don't move.

Tears spill down your cheeks. 

The animal body's response to being seen by something that should not be able to see. A reflex, a pressure release, your system venting whatever it can in a desperate attempt to process the input flooding through it. 

Your heart hammers inside your chest, your mouth bone dry. Your hands are numb at your sides, the fingers bloodless and tingling, and you can feel your pulse in your throat and your temples.

Entity X.

It's bigger than you thought. Bigger than BB's clipped descriptions and careful evasions. 

It fills the corridor the way a flood would. Totally, leaving no space unoccupied. And those eyes, those burning yellow eyes, are locked on you with a focus that’s not predatory. Not hungry. Patient. 

It’s been waiting for this, you realise with a lurch. To lure you out with the sound of your own voice and Bobby's voice and the argument calibrated to the exact frequency of your buried fury, and now that you're here, now that you're standing in the doorway with your tears on your face and your anger in your throat, it’s in no rush. 

It has what it wanted. Your attention. Your recognition. 

It reaches for you.

The arm extends. Long, impossibly long, the limb unfolding like a telescope, the joints articulating in that wrong way, and the hand comes through the doorway. Into the sublevel. Into BB's territory, into the space he carved and sealed and locked down, the space where nothing enters—

The hand comes apart.

Ribbons. The skin peels away from the fingers in long, wet strips, the flesh beneath splitting and curling back, and the arm disintegrates from fingertip to wrist to forearm in a cascade of shredding tissue that falls to the carpet in dark. Heavy coils dissolve on contact, eaten by the floor, absorbed into BB's territory like an immune response rejecting foreign matter. 

The barrier—invisible, structural, woven into the very air at a level you can't perceive—is doing what BB built it to do. Unmaking anything that tries to cross inside and harm you.

You scramble backwards.

Your heel catches the carpet. You stumble, catch yourself on the wall, push off, and your body is finally moving, finally responding. The paralysis encasing you cracks, and the survival brain kicks online with a screaming urgency.

You back away from the doorway, and Entity X is standing in the corridor beyond it, and you watch in mute terror as its arm begins to regrow. The ribbons reverse, the skin re-knitting, the flesh sealing back over the bones with a wet, thick sound like clay being pressed into shape.

It tracks your retreat with those yellow eyes, and it’s not even slightly bothered.

It’s not bothered at all.

It reaches again. The same arm, healed, whole, the matte red skin glistening faintly with the residue of its own reconstruction. It pushes through the barrier, and the skin starts to peel again. It pushes harder, the arm advancing centimetre by centimetre through the invisible wall, and the peeling is slower this time. 

The barrier is straining. You can feel it in the hum. A high, tight frequency that sounds like metal under stress, and Entity X is shredding its own flesh to reach you, and it doesn't flinch. Doesn't falter, those burning eyes fixed on you with an intensity that is not rage, not hunger, is something far worse than either.

It's insistence.

You turn and run.

The corridor stretches. Or you're running slower than you think, or the sublevel is responding to the breach by elongating, by putting distance between you and the doorway, and you sprint for the apartment at full speed. Your bare feet slap against the carpet, your breath coming in ragged, tearing gasps, and behind you, you can hear it. 

Not footsteps. A sound like tearing fabric, like the barrier giving way fibre by fibre, like something enormous and patient methodically peeling through a protection that was supposed to be absolute.

You slam through the apartment doors, gasping for breath. 

You scramble for the lock. It’s decorative, you know that, it's a human gesture in a human-shaped apartment, and it will stop nothing that just shredded itself through BB's barrier, but you still try, grabbing the bookshelf next. The one BB just arranged. Your notebooks cascade to the floor as you drag it across the carpet and shove it against the door. The wood scrapes, the weight of it pathetic against what's coming. 

You grab the kitchen table. A chair. The standing lamp from the corner. Anything. Everything. Piling it against the door in a barricade of furniture that looks exactly like what it is: a pathetic attempt to buy time.

“BB!”

Your voice breaks on his name. Cracks open, raw, a scream that comes from the bottom of your lungs and fills the apartment and bounces off the walls he built for you.

“BB, COME BACK! BB!”

The door splinters.

Not from the hinges. From the surface. The wood bulges inward, warping, then splits along a line running from top to bottom, and through the crack, you see it. The red. The matte, light-eating red. And then an arm. 

It comes through the gap the way the first one came through the barrier, fingers curling around the edge of the broken door, and the wood peels away from the frame in long strips. The apartment dismantles itself around the intrusion, BB's careful construction coming apart under the weight of something that will not stop.

The clawed hand reaches into the room.

You grab the lamp. The standing lamp, with a heavy brass base, the most solid thing within reach, and you swing it. It connects with the arm, bounces off the matte skin, and the impact travels up your wrists and into your shoulders, but the thing doesn't react. The arm keeps coming. You throw the lamp. Throw books. Throw a kitchen chair that shatters against the forearm and falls into pieces.

“Stay away from me!" You're screaming, your voice stripped raw, your body backing toward the far wall with nothing left to throw. “Get away—”

Entity X's eyes find you through the wreckage of the door.

Yellow. Burning. Fixed. It hasn't blinked. Through the barrier, through the peeling, the furniture and the lamp and the screaming. Those eyes locked onto you in the corridor, and they have not left you. 

They’ll not leave you, and the constancy of the gaze is the most terrifying thing you've ever experienced because it means you. You’re the target. You’ve always been the target. Whatever this thing is, whatever it wants, whatever fuel it runs on—it wants you, specifically, personally, with a focus that transcends predation and enters the territory of purpose.

The arm reaches for you. Healed. Whole. The stripped flesh re-formed, the fingers extended, and it's close enough now that you can see the texture of the skin. Up close, it's not smooth; it's covered in fine, hairline fractures. Like dried earth, something that cracked and sealed and cracked again, a surface that has been broken and rebuilt so many times, the damage has become a pattern.

The arm detaches.

Ripped, torn from the shoulder socket with a violence so total the sound it makes isn't a tear but a detonation. A concussive, wet blast that shakes the walls and sends a spray of dark viscera across the ceiling and the wrecked furniture and your face, warm and thick, smelling of copper and something older, something mineral.

Entity X's arm hits the floor. The fingers are still curling. Still reaching. Oriented toward you, even severed from the body.

The thing that threw it is standing in the doorway.

It’s not BB and not Bobby.

Not anything that has ever worn a human face, and you understand this immediately, viscerally, in the part of your brain that predates language and operates on pure animal recognition: the shape in the doorway is wrong. 

It's Bobby's height, but the proportions have shifted. The shoulders sit too wide, the stance too low, the geometry of the body rearranged into something optimised for destruction rather than disguise. The face is Bobby's face, but it's barely holding, the features sliding, the jaw too sharp, the eyes fully black. Two pits of absolute dark in a face that is coming apart at the seams. 

The skin is cracking. Not like Entity X's fractures—like porcelain, like a mask that's been struck, fissures radiating from the jaw and the cheekbones, and through the cracks you can see—not flesh, not bone, but nothing. An absence. A dark so total it makes Entity X's darkness look like shadow.

He's covered in black. Head to chest, arms to elbows, the viscous substance coating his skin and matting his hair to his forehead, dripping from his hands in long, slow ropes. Whatever distraction Entity X deployed to pull him from the perimeter, BB didn't just fight through it. 

He annihilated it. And he didn't stop to put the face back on before he came for you.

The hum collapses. 

The ambient frequency of Level 0—the constant, ever-present vibration that’s been the background radiation of your existence since you fell through the wall—drops to a subsonic register that you don't hear so much as feel. 

A pressure wave that presses against your eardrums, your chest, and settles at the backs of your eyes. The red lights in the corridor blow out. Every single one. The apartment goes dark except for Entity X's burning yellow eyes and the fissures in BB's cracking face, which glow. Faintly, coldly, with a light that has no colour name.

BB opens his mouth, and the sound that comes out is not a voice.

It’s the hum.

The hum itself, weaponised, concentrated, forced through a throat that has stopped pretending to be human. The sound fills the apartment, the corridor, the sublevel, more vibration than language, dragged through the collapsing shape of Bobby's vocal cords with a fury so enormous it makes the floor ripple:

“Clever distraction.”

Entity X turns.

The motion is glacial. Unhurried. The massive red body rotating in the wrecked doorway of the apartment to face the thing that just removed its arm, and even now—even turning to face BB, even orienting its body toward the threat—its eyes stay on you.

Its eyes stay on you.

The head doesn't move with the body. The neck articulates. Wrong, all wrong. Rotating independently of the torso at a degree that no anatomy should permit. The burning yellow gaze remains fixed on your position against the far wall while the body faces BB, the removed arm regrowing in wet, rapid pulses at the severed shoulder, rising to meet what's coming.

The fight starts.

You can't follow it. Not really. Not the way you'd follow a human fight, with fists and momentum and the readable physics of two bodies colliding. 

This is different. These are two beings that don't obey the laws of physics, tearing at each other in a space that's coming apart around them. 

BB moves the way he moved against the agents. Too fast, fluid, the human shape abandoned for something more efficient, more angular, more suited to what he actually is, and Entity X absorbs. Takes. Endures. 

BB tears through its torso, and the flesh re-knits immediately. BB shatters its jaw with a crack, the featureless face splintering like ceramic, the yellow eyes bulging through the fissures, and the jaw reforms. BB puts his fist through its chest, and the chest closes around his arm, and for a terrible second, they're locked, joined. BB rips free with a sound like tearing metal, and Entity X is already whole again, already standing, already watching you through the chaos with those eyes that have never left, never wavered, never once looked at anything else.

You're behind BB. Pressed against the wall, moving when he moves, keeping his body between you and the thing, and you're trying to be small, trying to be invisible, but Entity X doesn't need to see you to know where you are. It knows. The way it knew your voice. The way it knew Bobby's voice. The way it knew the exact argument to play through the walls to bring you to the threshold.

BB is winning. At first. His speed is devastating, his fury enormous, and Entity X staggers under the assault, the massive body driven backwards through the wrecked apartment and into the corridor, and for a few brutal seconds you think he's got this, he's got it, he's going to unmake it the way he unmade the Smiler—

Entity X catches his arm.

The movement is casual. Almost lazy. One massive red hand closing around BB's forearm mid-strike, and the force of the stop shudders through the corridor, through the floor under your feet. BB wrenches. Twists. The hand doesn't open. Entity X holds him there—one-armed, the other still regrowing—and for the first time in the fight, it isn't retreating.

It's pushing forward.

The shift is tectonic. 

Entity X drives BB backwards, and the corridor shakes around you. BB's feet leave the ground for a fraction of a second, and when he lands, his posture has changed. Less offensive, more braced, the shape of someone absorbing impact instead of delivering it. Entity X hits him. Open-handed, a strike that catches BB across the chest and sends him into the wall hard enough to crater the surface, and the sound BB makes is not a snarl. It's a gasp. A short, involuntary, winded exhalation, the noise of a body—even a body that isn't a body—taking damage it didn't expect.

And through it all. Through the fighting and the shattering and the black blood and the reknitting flesh.

Entity X's eyes never leave you.

The gaze stays locked on you with the serene, unwavering patience that knows this fight is temporary. That knows BB is between it and you, and that BB is the obstacle, but you’re the objective and obstacles, eventually, move.

BB goes down.

A blow you don't see—too fast, too angled, connecting with something vital in BB's body—and he hits the floor and doesn't get up immediately. 

He gets to his hands and knees. The black blood drips from his mouth now, from his nose, from a gash across his chest that isn't closing the way Entity X's wounds close. His arms are shaking. The human face is flickering. BB, then the thing beneath, then BB again, the mask destabilising under the damage, slipping.

“BB!”

You're moving before you think. Scrambling across the wreckage, over the broken furniture and the shattered doorframe, toward him, toward the crumpled shape of him on the floor, and your hands reach for his shoulders—

“Stop.”

His voice. A snarled command, delivered with every frequency he has. Human, inhuman, the hum itself weaponised into a single syllable that hits you in the chest like a physical force and roots your feet to the floor. 

He lifts his head. His eyes are black, and his mouth is black with blood. The expression on his face is wild, furious, terrified. An emotion he’s never shown you before, an emotion you didn't know he was capable of, and the terror is not for himself.

“Level 974.” He spits blood. Black. Thick. “Mr Kitty. You know the route. Go, now.”

“I'm not leaving you—”

“You’re a target.” Each word costs him. You can see it. The effort of speech, of maintaining the face, of holding the human shape together while the damage tries to unmake it. “As long as you’re here, it will not stop. It doesn't want me. It wants you. And I can't—” His jaw clenches, a tremor running through his arms. “I can't fight it and protect you. I need you gone. I need you out of range.”

Entity X rises behind him. The massive body straightening. The burning eyes on you. Always on you.

“BB—”

“I am older than this place.” Low. Fierce. Black blood on his teeth, and his eyes fully dark, the ancient thing speaking through the ruined face with a conviction that shakes the walls. “I’m older than the walls and the hum and the doors and it. I have survived every horror this place has made. But I cannot do it while I'm holding back.”

Holding back.

You understand, then. Instantly and fully. 

He's been fighting at half capacity. Less. Fighting with one hand while the other shields you, positioning his body between you and the thing, dividing his attention between destruction and protection and losing ground on both. But it's more than that. 

You look at his face—the cracking face, the flickering face, Bobby's features sliding and reforming and sliding again—and you understand the other constraint. 

The one he'd never say. The Bobby suit. The face, the body, the human shape he's maintained for you since the day you came through the wall. It takes power to hold it. Focus. Resources currently being spent on keeping twenty-two-year-old Bobby Franklin's jaw attached to his skull, instead of being channelled into whatever he actually is underneath. 

He's not just protecting you with his body. He's protecting you with his form. Keeping the familiar shape, the face you trust, the lips you kissed, but keeping all of it intact costs him, bleeds him, divides the vast and ancient thing into a fraction of its true capacity. 

As long as you're here, he will keep wearing Bobby. As long as he's wearing Bobby, Entity X will keep gaining ground.

You’re not his weakness. You’re his ceiling. And as long as you're in this corridor, he will keep hitting that ceiling, and Entity X will keep pushing through it, and the math only ends one way.

“Trust me,” BB says, blood in his mouth, the face slipping. The thing underneath looks at you with an intensity that has nothing to do with age or power but with promise he made you, his hand on your cheek. “Run.”

You grab the notebook.

It's on the floor, knocked from the shelf in the barricade, pages bent, the cover dented. 

You snatch it up. Press it to your chest. The routes are in there. Level 0 to Level 1, Level 1 to the stairwell threshold, the stairwell to the passage threading through Level 2 and opening into the long, dark corridor descending to Level 974. You mapped it. You walked it with BB at your side and his hand at your back, and you marked every turn, every landmark, every shift in the hum that signals a boundary.

You look at BB one more time. On the floor. Bleeding black. The face barely holding. Entity X rising behind him, vast and red and patient, those yellow eyes burning through the dark as it turns to follow you. 

BB snarls, and Entity X’s legs crack beneath it. 

You run.

Through the wrecked sublevel. Into the corridor, into Level 0, your notebook against your chest and your bare feet on the carpet and the sound of the fight erupting behind you. Massive, structural, the sound of two ancient things finally meeting without a ceiling, and you run toward the route you mapped, the path you memorised, and you don't look back.

You run until you can't hear it anymore.

The fight stopped being audible three corridors back; the sounds of two entities tearing each other apart swallowed by the hum. 

What you're running from now is the silence. Weighted silence of a level that’s been breached, holding itself still the way an animal holds still when the predator is too close to outrun. The red light hasn't faded. It pulses occasionally, as if Level 0 itself is wounded and you're running through it.

Your bare feet slap on the carpet, the notebook clutched to your chest. The cover bent, the pages pressed against your sternum. 

You're navigating from memory now, the left fork at the junction where the carpet gets warmer, the right turn at the corridor where the hum drops a semitone, the long stretch past the section with the water-stained ceiling tiles that marks the boundary of BB's inner territory. 

You know this route, walked it with BB multiple times. Traced it in the notebook with blue ink and annotated the landmarks and tested yourself on it in the nest while BB watched with that quiet pride, and the memory of his face—the last time you saw it, cracking, bleeding black, the ancient thing surfacing through the fissures—makes your vision blur and you blink hard and keep running.

The corridor opens up.

You skid to a stop. The junction ahead is the one that leads to the stairwell threshold, the one that drops you into the transitional space between Level 0 and Level 1. 

But that’s not why you stop. You stop because the corridor is full of furniture.

And you know this furniture. The recognition is immediate, physical. The flat-packed shelving units with the Scandinavian labels. The plastic-wrapped headboards stacked against the wall. A dining table, oak veneer, the floor model with the scratch on the left leg where Bobby kicked it once, carrying inventory, and the scratch is there, exactly where it should be. The recognition hits you like a blow because this is Clark's. 

Clark's inventory: the same flatpacks and display pieces you organised on night shifts, labelled in your handwriting, and sorted by vendor into bins.

The Backrooms do this. You know they do. They absorb, they replicate, they pull pieces of the real world through the membrane and deposit them in corridors like driftwood. BB explained it once: the levels aren't separate from reality, they're underneath it, and sometimes the underneath leaks up and the above leaks down and things end up where they don't belong. 

But knowing the mechanics doesn't prepare you for the lurch of seeing Clark's dining table in a yellow corridor, and you press your hand to the wall and breathe. The wall is warm under your palm, and you think of BB, and the thought is a blade, so you keep moving—

Voices.

Entity X's lure would be sourceless, directionless. These voices have a direction. They're coming from ahead and to the left, from the section of the corridor that bends around the stacked flatpacks, and they're real. Human. Layered on top of each other with the particular rhythm of people talking in a confined space, voices bouncing off hard surfaces, and you can hear—

“—I don't care, I'm going down there, let go of—”

“Bobby, stop, you can't just—we don't know what's down there, we don't know if—”

“—came through here, right? Through this wall, through this—whatever the hell this is. If she came through here, maybe she's lost, maybe she's—”

“Bobby. Baby. Listen to me—”

Your feet stop. Your lungs cease functioning. 

Bobby.

Bobby's voice. Real, live, present. Happening right now on the other side of a bend in a corridor that shouldn't exist. 

You'd know Entity X's trick by now, the sourceless quality, the way it comes from everywhere and nowhere. This has a direction. This has Bobby's actual vocal cords behind it. And it sounds different. The tired, dismissive Bobby who said you're being dramatic is gone. This voice is raw. Stripped. A man speaking through gravel, through grief so thorough it's changed the texture of his vocal cords. Desperate in a way Bobby never used to sound because Bobby never used to let himself sound like anything except perfectly at ease.

And the other voice. The woman. Calling him baby.

You step past the wall.

The corridor opens into a wider space. One of the junction rooms, the kind where several hallways converge, and the ceiling is higher, the fluorescents brighter, and the hum is louder because more of Level 0 is accessible from a single point. The flatpack furniture from Clark's store is stacked along the walls. A rope trails across the carpet from the far wall, where the concrete appears to dip into a dark space below.

Clark stands near the rope. Older than you remember. Heavier in the face, the circles under his eyes darker, his work shirt untucked and stained, his hands clenched. He looks terrified and dazed in equal measure. 

And a woman. Young. Dark hair, cut short, slip flops. She's got one hand on Bobby's arm and the other pressed to her own chest, and her face is tight with a fear that hasn't fully landed yet, still hovering in the space between this can't be real and this is real, and I might die.

And Bobby.

Your Bobby.

He's standing in the middle of the junction room with the rope half-tied from his belt and a camera in his hand—of course, even here, even in the impossible, Bobby brought the camera—and he's thinner. 

The crop top hangs differently on him now, looser, the chain at his throat sitting lower against collarbones that are more prominent than they used to be. His face is harder. The softness that used to live at the edges, the boyish quality, the roundness that you used to trace with your fingers in the morning light, is gone. Carved away. What's left is angular, drawn, the face of a man who hasn't been sleeping right for a long time. Who hasn't been eating right, either. 

He’s been doing something to himself, or having something done to him, that has stripped the youth from his bones and left behind this sharpened, hollowed version of the person you loved.

You don't know how long it's been. You don't know what happened to him after you fell through the wall. You just know that the Bobby standing in front of you is not the Bobby you left, and the distance between those two versions is written in the new, foreign angles of his still handsome face.

The woman spots you first.

Her gasp is sharp, bitten off, the sound of a person encountering something that doesn't fit the parameters of what she was prepared for. Her hand tightens on Bobby's arm. Her eyes go wide, and her body shifts. Backwards, behind him, an instinct that tells you everything about their dynamic in a single gesture.

Bobby turns.

For a moment, there's only shocked silence. Bobby stares at you. You stare at Bobby. 

The light buzzes, and the rope trails across the carpet. The woman's hand is on his arm, and Clark's flashlight beam trembles on the floor, and you’re standing ten feet apart in an impossible place, looking at each other for the first time since the doorway, the grunt, and the don't wait up and neither of you breathes.

Bobby's mouth moves. No sound, a rasp of breath. Then, cracking at the edges:

"Baby?"

His voice splinters on the second syllable. Splits open. The word comes out ragged, disbelieving, torn from somewhere deep, and the information—you, standing in a yellow corridor, alive, alive—is too big for his face, and the room.

You don't respond. You can't. Your throat has closed around a sound that won't form. 

You're looking at him. Bobby. Real Bobby. The original. The man whose face you've been kissing on another body for who knows how long, whose voice you've been hearing through borrowed vocal cords, whose edges and angles and scars you've memorised on a copy so perfect you'd almost forgotten there was an original. 

And here he is. Diminished and sharpened, desperate and real, standing in front of you in a crop top and a chain with a camera in his shaking hand, and the distance between you is ten feet, and however long it's been and all the things neither of you said.

Bobby drops the camera.

It hits the carpet with a muted thud. 

Bobby, who’s never let go of a camera voluntarily in his life, who held onto the viewfinder the way other men hold onto control, lets it fall from his fingers like it weighs nothing. Like it was never important, like every hour of footage he ever shot was just a rehearsal for the moment he'd need his hands free to reach for you.

He yanks at the rope around his waist. His fingers are clumsy, frantic, tearing at the knot rather than untying it, his jaw clenched and his breathing coming in short, hard bursts through his nose. The woman takes a step toward him.

“Bobby, wait, you don't know if—”

He doesn't hear her. The rope falls. He steps out of it like stepping out of a skin he doesn't need anymore, and he starts walking toward you. Fast, accelerating, his stride lengthening with each step, his breathing growing more laboured, and the expression on his face is furious. 

At the ten feet of carpet between his body and yours, at whatever he's been through since you vanished, at whatever it cost him, and he’s crossing it with the barely-contained ferocity.

He stops. Three feet from you. Two.

“Fuck,” he whispers, his eyes glassy, red-rimmed. His lashes are wet. Bobby, who doesn't cry in front of people, who presses the heels of his hands into his eyes and grinds the tears back, who’s never once let you see him break, is standing in front of you with tears in his eyes and making no effort to hide them. 

“Fuck,” he says again, softer, cracking, his whole face contorting around the word like it's the only syllable left in his vocabulary. 

He's looking at your face. Scanning every feature the way he used to scan you through the viewfinder, except there's no viewfinder now, no glass, nothing between his eyes and your face, and you can see the exact moment his brain confirms what his body already knows.

It's you. It's really you.

His hand lifts. Shaking. Visibly, violently shaking, the tremor running from his shoulder through his elbow through his wrist through his fingers, and his hand reaches across the two feet of air between you and lands on your shoulder.

You flinch.

Bobby makes a sound. A wrecked, gutted thing. Less than a gasp, more than a breath. His fingers tighten on your shoulder, involuntary, desperate, like he's afraid you'll dissolve if he loosens his grip. His other hand comes up and grabs your other shoulder, and he's holding you at arm's length with both hands, his face falling apart, the composure crumbling, and his voice when it comes out is barely there:

“You're real. God, please, tell me you're real, baby. Tell me this isn't—tell me I'm not—”

You're both breathing hard. Standing in a yellow corridor, his hand on your shoulder. Your body is rigid, his eyes wet as they drink you in, and the woman behind him is watching you both. Clark mumbles his disbelief faintly, and the world reduces to the two feet of air between your body and Bobby’s and all the wreckage on either side.

Bobby whispers your name.

Not baby. Your name. The real one, the full one, spoken so quietly you almost don't hear it, spoken the way you'd speak a word you're afraid will break if you say it too loud. Your name in Bobby's real mouth, the one that kissed you on a Thursday morning and said stay and meant it, and the sound of it cracks you open. 

He throws his arms around you.

Without gentleness, without hesitation. Bobby grabs you with both arms and pulls you into his chest so hard you stumble, your bare feet sliding on the carpet. His arms lock around your back, and his face buries in your neck. He's holding you desperately, with the full-body grip, a man who’s just recovered the thing he was drowning without.

He's warm.

The realisation hits you with a horrible, dizzying vertigo. He's warm. His hands on your shoulders were hot. Searingly, really, shockingly hot after months of BB's cool skin, BB's below-human temperature, the constant slight chill of a body that generates heat only when kissed into producing it. 

Now his whole body is pressed against yours, and he’s a furnace. Metabolic, organic, almost unbearable. The heat of blood moving through capillaries, of a heart pumping in a chest that rises and falls because it has to, because it will stop if it doesn't. He smells like soap. Faintly. Under that, sweat. Actual sweat, the salt-and-skin smell of a human body under stress. 

And underneath that, barely there, weed. Like he smoked before coming down here. Like Bobby needed his hands to stop shaking long enough to hold the camera, and the specificity of it, the humanness of it, the biochemical reality of a man who self-medicates his anxiety with marijuana and has done it since he was nineteen, is so overwhelmingly, violently real that your knees buckle.

You cling to him. 

Your arms come up—late, delayed, your body catching up to the fact that this is happening—and your fingers grab fistfuls of his shirt, and you hold on. He holds on too, and you're both shaking. Both gasping, making sounds that aren't words at the sheer impossibility of it all. 

Just grief and relief and terror and love, suddenly all the same thing. 

Bobby's hand is on the back of your head, pressing your face into his neck, and his chest is heaving, his pulse hammering against your cheek, and he's alive, he's alive, he came for you, he found the wall, and he came through, and he's here and—

“Bobby?”

The woman's voice. Small. Wary. She's standing behind Bobby with her arms wrapped around herself and her face pinched with confusion, frightened, and underneath both of those, a hurt she's trying very hard not to let surface. She's staring at you. At your head, pressed into Bobby's neck. At Bobby's arms around you, locked, total. 

The way he's holding you like the building could come down, and he wouldn't let go.

Bobby pulls back. Only his head, only enough to see your face. His hands come up and cup your jaw, framing your face the way he used to frame shots, and his thumbs trace your cheekbones and his eyes drag over your features with the starving hunger.

“You're alive,” Bobby says hoarsely, his thumbs on your cheekbones and his eyes bright. “You're alive. I thought—the tapes, they went blank, they all went—I thought you were—fuck, you're alive. I missed so fucking much—"

The lights go red.

A sudden, total shift. Every fluorescent in the junction room snaps from yellow to deep crimson in the space of a single heartbeat, and the hum screams. A high, keening frequency that's less sound and more pressure, a vibration that pushes against your eardrums again and fills your skull. An alarm. Organic, not mechanical. 

The level itself shrieks, Level 0 responding to a breach so severe that its entire frequency is destabilising.

You know this sound, know what it means. Your body knows before your brain catches up. The red means Entity X. The alarm means the fight has moved, or ended, or escalated beyond what the level can contain. The walls are wrong, and the carpet under your feet is vibrating with a frequency you've never felt before, and every nerve in your body is firing the same message: move.

You grab Bobby's hand. Hard. Your fingers lacing through his.

“Come with me. Right now.”

“What—what is that, what's happen—”

“Right now, Bobby.”

The woman closes the distance. She's been standing behind him, arms wrapped around herself, but the alarm has shaken her forward, adrenaline overriding the hurt on her face, and she grabs Bobby's other arm with both hands.

“Bobby is not going anywhere," she insists, her voice steady. Tighter than her face. “We came here together, and we're leaving together—back through the wall, not deeper into—”

You look at her. Really look at her for the first time. Dark hair. Round jaw. Pretty in a girl-next-door way. You focus on the way she holds Bobby’s arm, the way she positions herself behind him, and remember the baby she called earlier. You see it, and something cold slides between your ribs and sits there.

“Who are you?” you ask flatly.

Bobby's hand tightens in yours. “She's—this is Kat, she works at—”

A scream splits the corridor.

Not human. Long, oscillating, rising in pitch until it hits a frequency that makes the flatpack shelving units rattle against the walls. Howler. Close. Moving fast, drawn by the alarm the way predators are drawn by distress signals, and the sound of it snaps through the junction room like a whip.

“If you want to live,” you begin, your voice dropping into a register you didn't know you owned, calm, flat, cold, the voice of a woman who’s mapped multiple levels and catalogued fifty-three entity types and survived— “you'll follow me. Now.”

You pull Bobby. Bobby grabs Kat, and you move.

You lead them the only way you know how. By the notebook, by the months of repetition and documentation. 

You check each junction against the layout in your head, cross-referencing the hum's pitch and the angle of the corridor walls. Left at the warm patch. Right at the stain. Down the corridor, where the ceiling drops by three inches and the air smells damp. Through the threshold that shifts from carpet to tile and tile to the stairwell that descends between levels.

Bobby is behind you. His hand in yours. He won't let go. His grip is crushing, his callused fingers locked around your palm with a force that will leave bruises, and every few steps, his thumb moves against your wrist. Some involuntary check, a pulse-read, confirming you're still there, still solid, still real.

“How long have you been here?” he asks. Moving fast, breathing hard, his voice pitched low. The camera is gone. Left on the carpet in the junction room, the first time Bobby has abandoned a camera since he was a boy. “How did you—are you hurt? Are you okay?”

“I'm fine.”

“You're not fine, you're barefoot in a—what is this place? Where are we?”

You work your jaw, scanning ahead to escape the storm of warring emotions in your chest. “Keep moving.”

“Baby—”

“Don't call me that.”

The words leave your mouth before you can catch them. Sharp. Reflexive. A flinch turned verbal. 

Bobby's hand tightens on yours, and you feel the impact of the words travel through his grip like a current. A brief, rigid shock, a stiffening of the fingers.

You keep walking. The stairwell descends. Kat is behind Bobby, her hand on the back of his shirt, her breathing ragged, her head on a swivel. She's terrified. You can hear it in the quality of her breath. Short, high, the particular arrhythmia of a nervous system running on pure cortisol. But she's moving. She's keeping up. She hasn't frozen up. 

Some distant, clinical part of you notes this with grudging respect.

Through Level 2. The dripping pipes and the dark. Bobby pulls Kat closer as the dripping grows louder and the shadows lengthen. Something in the walls makes a sound like breathing, and you watch him do it from the corner of your eye—watch his hand find her shoulder, watch his body angle between her and the dark—and the cold thing between your ribs turns over.

Through the transitional corridor. Down. The air changes again. Warmer, sweeter, carrying the faint smell of grass and dust, the signature of the levels that sit closer to the organic stratum. You check the notebook. Page thirty-seven. The route to 974.

Bobby is watching you. You can feel his eyes on the back of your head, on your bare feet, on the notebook clutched in your hand. On the way you navigate this impossible place with confidence. You feel him putting pieces together. That you’ve been here long enough to stop being lost. Long enough to have a system. To have bare feet, which means long enough to have stopped expecting to leave.

“You know this place,” he says. Not a question. His voice is careful, testing, wariness of someone who’s assembling a picture he doesn't want to see. “You've been—you've been here this whole time?”

“Yes.”

“Eighteen months?”

You pause. “Is that how long it's been?”

The silence behind you is devastating. Bobby's thumb stops its circuit on your wrist. Kat makes a small, wounded sound of realisation. If she wasn’t sure who you were before, she is now. 

“You didn't know,” Bobby says quietly. “You didn't know how long.”

You keep walking. The corridor opens up, the air changing again. A final threshold, a shift in the hum, and the space ahead brightens. Not with fluorescent light but something softer, golden. 

Scent of freshly cut grass, old wood and sugar fills your nose, followed by the particular mustiness of a house that’s been lived in by a being both patient and old for a very long time.

Level 974.

Mr Kitty appears at once.

One moment, the entrance to 974 is empty. The amber light, the corridor opening onto a landscape of gently rolling hills and scattered structures, some of them painted in colours too cheerful for the Backrooms, pinks and pastels that shouldn't survive down here. 

The next moment, he's there. Tall. Black. A humanoid shape standing in the centre of the path, its skin the deep, light-absorbing matte of a body that exists as a silhouette even in full illumination. It has no face. The surface where features should be is smooth, blank, and featureless, but the blankness differs from that of Entity X. 

Where Entity X's facelessness was a threat, a void, a surface that peeled open to reveal burning eyes, Mr Kitty's is gentle. Calm. The blankness of a thing that doesn't need a face because its presence communicates everything a face would. It stands with its long arms at its sides, and its smooth head tilted toward your group, its posture radiating patience the way the hum radiates sound.

Kat screams.

A sharp, bitten-off shriek at the wrongness of it, the too-tall body, the faceless head, the quality of ancient, unhurried presence that radiates from it. The scream bounces off the corridor behind you and fades into the amber light.

Bobby jerks to action. Reflex, instinct, the hardwired response to protect the person behind him. He steps in front of Kat, his arm sweeping back to push her behind his body, his jaw set and his eyes wide. His other hand still grips yours so tightly the bones grind together. 

His body is a wall between her and the threat, and the positioning is automatic, total, the posture of a man who does this without thinking.

Your stomach hollows out.

A different emptiness than fear. A cavity that opens beneath your ribs and fills with something cold and acidic. You watch Bobby shield Kat with his body the way he should have shielded you, the way you wished he would have shielded you, the way you spent months standing in doorways wishing he'd turn around and step toward you and put himself between you and anything at all. 

And he's doing it now. For her. The reflexive, unthinking protectiveness he could never perform for you when it was you who needed it. The muscle he let atrophy while you were his has somehow been rebuilt for someone else.

“It's okay,” you say, and your voice comes out even. Controlled. The cold thing behind your ribs makes your words clear. “He won't hurt you. He's safe.”

“He?” Bobby stares at the figure. The figure's blank face turns toward him. Bobby's hand tightens on yours.

“Mr Kitty.” You step forward. The tall, dark shape inclines its head toward you. A brief, acknowledging tilt, the gesture of a being that knows you and has been expecting you. “I need your help. Entity X breached the sublevel. BB is fighting it. I need—”

I'm aware.

The voice arrives inside your skull. A warm, dense pressure that fills the space behind your eyes and settles into your thoughts like sediment into still water. Mr Kitty's blank face is angled toward yours. The stillness radiating from him is calm. Steady. 

The disturbance registered across many levels. The barrier on Level 0 has been partially compromised. Your boy is still engaged.

Your stomach knots. “Is he winning?”

That depends on your definition.

“Is he alive?”

A pause. Mr Kitty's blank head inclines slightly, a gesture you've come to read as contemplation. He does not die the way you understand dying. But he is diminished. The sustained engagement is costly. The red one first used other entities to weaken him.

“Can we use your house? I need to get them somewhere safe.” Your voice catches. “Please. Just…”

Follow the path, little one. You’ll see it in the distance. I need to check the perimeter first. It’s chaos out there. Something else might slip through. 

You nod, gratitude plain on your face. Bobby and Kat are staring at you with matching expressions of blank, dissociated horror when you turn to them. 

“You were talking to it,” Bobby blurts out, flat with disbelief when Mr Kitty flickers out of sight. "You were having a conversation with a faceless thing. What the fuck.”

“It's complicated,” you mutter. “Follow me. Quickly.”

You lead them up the path. The amber light is steady here, warm and sourceless, and the hills roll gently toward a cluster of structures. 

Houses, loosely, buildings with doors and windows and roofs that approximate the concept of dwelling in the way the Backrooms approximate everything. Close enough to function but underlaid with a wrongness that only registers if you look too long. The second structure on the right is small. Wooden. A porch with a rocking chair. 

The door opens when you touch it, and the inside smells like dust and old paper and tea and the particular warmth of a house that is, impossibly, safe.

Mr Kitty is already inside. Standing in the corner of the kitchen, his dark shape nearly touching the ceiling, his long arms folded in front of him with a stillness that radiates patience. The plate of scones sits on the counter beside him.

You usher Bobby and Kat inside. Kat's hands are shaking. Bobby's jaw is tight, and his eyes are moving—scanning the room, the windows, Mr Kitty's dark shape in the corner, you—with the frantic, comprehensive attention of a man who is trying very hard to apply logic to a situation that has left logic behind long ago.

“Sit,” you say. “Eat. Don't touch anything you don't recognise, especially the toys.”

You look behind them. The doorway is empty. The amber path stretches back toward the corridor, quiet.

“Where's Clark?”

Bobby's jaw tightens. He doesn't look at the door. “We got separated. The dark section, with the pipes. Something moved in the walls, and he panicked and ran the wrong direction and I—” He stops. Swallows. The guilt on his face is immediate, reflexive. “I couldn't go after him. I had to keep—I had to keep moving forward."

Kat puts her hand on his arm. “He had the rope. He can follow it back.”

“The rope was tied to me.”

The silence fills the room. You look at the door. Clark is somewhere in the Backrooms, alone, without a map, without a guide, without the months of hard-won knowledge sitting in the notebook pressed to your chest. Clark is somewhere in the dark, and he’s still a man who hired you, who complimented your attention to detail, told you once in an offhand way that seemed to surprise even him that you would’ve made a fine architect, like him. 

“Mr Kitty,” you say, turning toward the entity. “Clark. He's on Level 2. Can you—”

I'm aware. I'll send guidance. The older male is frightened but unharmed. For now.

You cross to the window. The amber light outside is steady. The green hills are quiet. No red in sight. You press your palm flat against the glass and close your eyes, reaching the way BB taught you. Not with your hands but with the part of you that connects to the hum, the part that learned to feel Level 0's frequency like a second heartbeat—

Nothing.

“BB,” you call out. Into the glass and beyond it. “BB, please, answer me. BB?”

Nothing. The window is cold under your hand. He always answers you. Always. From any level, from any distance.

“Who's BB?”

Bobby. Behind you. Standing by the kitchen table, a scone untouched in his hand, watching you with an expression that has shifted from shock to something more complicated. Suspicious, calculating.

You turn back to face the window. “Not now.”

“You just called someone's name into a window. In a house inside a nightmare. I think now is pretty much exactly when.”

“Bobby—”

“Is it a person? Another… another one of those things, like the tall one? Are you with someone down here?” He sets the scone on the table. His frown deepens when you don’t correct him. “What—is he your new boyfriend or something? Does he have a face, at least?”

The laugh that comes out of you is ugly. Short, throaty, carrying a bitterness you didn't know you had room for on top of everything else. You turn from the window, glaring, ignoring the pang of relief, love, and warmth you feel at the sight of him despite it all.

“You don't get to ask me that.”

“I don't get to—I just found you. I've been looking for you for eighteen months. I sat in a basement and talked to a goddamn wall for seven months because I thought—because I hoped— nd you're down here with a name for someone and—”

“And what, Bobby? What were you doing while you were sitting in that basement? Because it looks like you were doing pretty well.” Your eyes cut to Kat, who’s standing by the counter with a scone in her hand and her face pinched still. “Looks like you bounced back just fine.”

The room goes quiet. 

Bobby stares at you. The hurt on his face is immediate, unguarded, a direct hit. The flinch he didn't have time to armour against, the naked impact of being told by the woman he's been grieving that his grief wasn't enough. His jaw tightens, eyes hardening.

“You think I bounced back?” Low. Dangerous. Bobby's edge, the blade under the casual, the sharp thing that used to make you go quiet, except right now it's not going to make you go quiet because you’ve spent months in the impossible learning how to not go quiet. “You think—do you have any idea what it was like? You disappeared. You just vanished. No note, no call, no body, nothing. The cops thought I killed you. They hauled me in, sat me down and looked at me like I was something he scraped off his shoe. I sat there, and I took it because what was I gonna say? She up and vanished? The neighbours heard us fighting. Terrence would barely talk to me unless it's about searching for you. People won’t look at me around town. My own mother—”

“Bobby, maybe this isn't the—” Kat starts.

“And the tapes.” Bobby's voice cracks, just slightly. A tiny fracture in the anger and grief. “The tapes went blank. All of them. Every single one. Years of footage and it just—you just—disappeared. From the tapes, from people's memories, from everything. Terrence couldn't remember what you looked like. My mom called you 'Bobby's friend.' Nobody remembered you. Nobody, except me. And I thought I was losing my fucking mind because I could remember and no one else could, and the tapes were blank and you were gone and I had nothing, nothing—”

“I'm sure your new girlfriend was very comforting,” you cut in coolly. “In your grief.”

The words come out serrated. Cruel. You hear them leave your mouth, and you can feel the wrongness of them, the unfairness. This woman is standing three feet away, and you don't know her. You’re aiming your pain at her like a weapon because she's standing next to Bobby and keeping his name in her mouth, and the alternative is aiming the anger at yourself.

Kat's face goes white. Then red. Her hand tightens around the scone, and she sets it down on the counter, carefully, the controlled gesture of a woman who’s choosing her next words carefully.

“I kept him alive,” Kat says. Quiet. Level. A statement of fact delivered with a steady gaze. “When everyone else gave up or thought he was a killer, I was there. Every night. I didn't leave.”

Your mouth compresses into a bloodless line. “How noble.”

“You left.”

“I didn't leave, I—”

“I know, I’m sorry that came out wrong.” Kat's voice doesn't rise. It drops, gets quieter. Gets closer to the bone. “I know something happened to you. Clearly. Since you’re here. I know you didn't choose this. But he didn't know that. He sat in a basement for seven months talking to an empty wall, and then Clark kicked him out, and he sat in a parking lot, screaming at me because he couldn't scream at you, and I stayed. I stayed when everyone else left. So don't stand there and act like I stole something from you. I picked up what you couldn't carry anymore because you weren’t there."

The room vibrates. Not with sound. With the tension of three people, holding pain that doesn't fit. Pain that belongs to eighteen months of separation and misunderstanding and choices made in the dark by people who were all, in their own ways, trying to survive.

Bobby is looking at you. His eyes are red, jaw set, his hands fisted at his sides.

“It took months,” he chokes out. “It took months after Clark kicked me out. Months before—before anything. I was a wreck, and she was kind to me. I pushed her away, and I pushed her away, and I pushed her away, and eventually I—” He swallows thickly. “I had nothing. You were gone. The tapes were gone. And I had to—I had to keep living, baby. I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I kept living.”

“I'm sure it was very hard," you bite out coldly. “Having to move on after seven whole months.”

“Seven months of sitting on a concrete floor talking to you.” Bobby takes a step toward you. His voice rising now, the anger competing with the grief, both of them pushing through the cracks in his face. “Seven months of bringing you coffee, your order, every night, and pouring it down the drain at two in the morning because you weren't there to drink it. Seven months of sleeping on your side of the bed because it still smelled like you for the first three weeks, and then it didn't, and that was worse. Seven months of saying I love you to a wall, night after night after night, and the wall never answered. So yeah. Yeah, it was hard. Sorry, it wasn't long enough for you.”

“Then maybe you should have told me you loved me before I disappeared.”

The words come out cold. A scalpel drawn across the exact right vein, delivered with a fury so controlled it's almost calm, practically a snarl. Your jaw sits tight, and your eyes burn, voice carrying the compressed weight of every night you lay three feet from Bobby in the dark and wondered if you were still visible.

“Maybe if you'd said it once—” Your voice cracks. Splits. Your anger rises like bile, flooding your throat, and you can feel it. The rage, the one BB heard through the wall, the one you buried under self-doubt and swallowed until it poisoned you. It's here. Right here. Pressing against your teeth, trying to get out. “Maybe if you'd just—maybe—”

You stop.

Your jaw clamps shut, your hands fisted at your sides. You can feel the anger writhing in your chest, trying to claw its way up your throat, and you swallow it. Again. The way you've always swallowed it. Push it down. Fold it in. Turn it inward because the alternative is letting it out, and if you let it out, you don't know what might happen, you don't know what it might burn down, you don't know—

In the corner of the room, Mr Kitty tips his head.

A slow, measured tilt. His blank face angling toward you with a quality of attention that's different from his usual patient stillness. Then the moment passes, and Mr Kitty's head straightens again. 

Bobby is staring at you. The anger on his face has fractured. What's underneath it is worse. Hurt, raw and exposed. Kat stands at the counter behind him with her arms crossed and her face closed. The hurt she's refusing to show bleeds through anyway, visible in the set of her mouth and the brightness of her dark eyes.

You're about to speak. The words are loaded, chambered, aimed—the doorway, the grunt, the don't wait up, the months of feeling like furniture in your shared apartment and now learning it took him seven whole months of dramatic wall-performances before he found a fucking replacement—

And then you hear what he said.

You hear it. Underneath the anger, underneath the accusations. The specific, factual content buried in the grief.

Seven months of sitting on a concrete floor talking to you.

The basement. Clark's basement. The storage level, the concrete floor, and the wall that breathes. 

Bobby sat in the basement and talked to the wall you fell through. For seven months. Talked to you, through the wall, the same wall that separates the real world from the Backrooms, the same wall that BB sat on the other side of and listened through. BB heard you through the wall. That's what he told you himself. I heard you. From the other side.

If BB heard you through the wall, then BB heard Bobby, too. Bobby's voice, Bobby's grief, Bobby's confessions and apologies poured into concrete for seven months. BB heard a man sitting on the other side of the wall begging you to come back, searching for you, refusing to give up.

BB heard all of it.

BB knew Bobby was looking for you. Knew Bobby loved you. Bobby was sitting three inches of concrete away from the woman BB was holding in the dark, and BB said nothing. BB held you while you cried about Bobby's indifference, and he said it was never you, it was his malfunction, and he knew (he knew) that Bobby was on the other side of that wall. 

He chose, deliberately, consciously, with the full weight of whatever passes for his moral compass, to keep that from you.

BB let you believe Bobby didn't care.

BB let you grieve a living man.

And the worst part—the part that makes your vision narrow and your hands shake and something hot and corrosive flood the back of your throat—is that it worked. It worked. 

You grieved Bobby. You swallowed the anger, folded the hurt inward, and accepted BB's version of the story. He got scared and retreated; that's his malfunction, not yours. 

You let it hollow you out, let it carve the space that BB then filled, and the filling felt like love. The forehead kisses. The promise. The apartment he built for you, the bookshelves by colour, the way he learned to dance and to kiss and to hold you through nightmares. All of it—every tenderness, every moment you thought this is what it feels like to be seen, to be loved—was planted in soil he'd poisoned. 

He didn't just withhold information. He cultivated your grief. He let the hurt grow until it choked out everything else, until Bobby was a wound instead of a person, until you stopped hoping for the door back because what was the point of a door that opened onto a man who didn't love you?

Except Bobby loved you. Bobby loved you the whole time. He loved you so much he sat on a concrete floor for seven months saying it to a wall that wouldn't answer and BB was on the other side of that wall listening and he heard every word and he held your face and said how odd and kissed your forehead and never once, not once, said he's looking for you, he's right there, he hasn't stopped.

The realisation doesn't land like a blow. It lands like a floor giving way. Every tender moment. Every I heard you and nobody else did. Every forehead kiss, every promise, every night in the nest with his cool hand on your back and his hum in your bones. 

All of it built on an omission so vast it restructures everything it touches.

You want to scream. Want to put your fist through the window of this safe house and scream BB's name into the amber light and demand—demand—that he explain himself, that he look at you with those borrowed eyes and tell you why. 

Why did he let you believe you were forgotten? Why did he let you ache for a man who was aching back, three inches of concrete and a universe apart, both of you reaching for each other in the dark while the thing between you held you close and said I've got you, baby, nothing touches you.

Nothing touches you. Because BB made sure nothing reached you. Not even the truth.

Part of you—small, stubborn, lodged behind your ribs like a splinter—whispers that he did it because he loves you. 

That the omission wasn't deliberate cruelty but desperation. That BB heard Bobby through the wall and understood, with the clarity of a thing that’s never been loved or chosen, that the truth would take you away from him. That the choice was between honesty and losing the only person who ever said his name kindly. And the whisper sounds like BB’s voice, and it sounds like the hum. It makes your eyes burn because you understand desperation and loneliness, you understand choosing wrong because the right choice is unbearable—isn't that exactly what Bobby did? What you did by choosing to stay? 

Isn't that the whole stupid, devastating circle? Bobby loved you and showed it by looking away. BB loved you and showed it by keeping you blind.

The whisper doesn't survive the inferno in your chest.

He knew. He knew. And he kept you anyway.

Your mouth opens. The questions forming on your tongue, taking shape, gaining mass—

A crack splits the room. Structural, not sonic. The walls of the house shudder. The windows fracture, the glass spiderwebbing from the centre to the frame in a pattern that resembles stress lines. Kat screams, a sharp, yelping sound. Mr Kitty straightens to his full height, his dark shape pressing against the ceiling, his blank face oriented toward the source of the disturbance with a sudden, absolute alertness.

Bobby is wrenched forward.

One second, he's standing by the kitchen table. The next he's airborne, yanked off his feet by a force that crosses the room faster than sight, faster than the sound that follows it. A percussive boom that blows the scones off the counter and knocks Kat sideways. 

Bobby slams into the far wall, and the wall cracks behind him. He's pinned there, three feet off the ground, his feet dangling, his hands clawing at the thing around his throat.

BB's hand.

BB is in the room. Not entered, arrived, the air displacing around his sudden presence with a pressure change you feel in your sinuses. 

He's holding Bobby against the wall by the throat, one-handed, arm extended, and the face he's wearing is Bobby's face, but it's not—it's wrong, more animal than human, the features sharpened past recognition, the jaw too wide, the teeth visible behind lips that have pulled back in a snarl that doesn't belong on any human mouth. His eyes are black. Fully black. The fissures from the fight are still visible, tiny cracks radiating from his jaw and cheekbones, leaking that colourless light, the mask of Bobby held together by fury and will and nothing else.

One arm hangs at an angle that isn't right. Dark, viscous blood streaks his chest, his neck, his hair. The crop top is torn. The chain is broken, hanging from one side of his throat. He looks like he walked through a war to get here, and the war isn't over; it's just been put on pause long enough for him to cross the Backrooms and find the one thing in his territory that doesn't belong.

Bobby chokes. His feet kick. His hands grab BB's wrist, but BB doesn't move, doesn't register the resistance, a marble statue with a throat in its hand.

BB leans in. Close. His face inches from Bobby's, the original and the copy, face to face at last, the man and the thing that chose his face. Bobby's eyes are wide, bulging, filled with a terror that’s different from any terror he’s ever felt because he’s looking into his own features and finding nothing human behind them.

BB bares his bloodied teeth, snarling low in his chest. 

“How dare you be here?”