Bitter Post-Millennial

Pulling himself from a drunken stupor, his head pounding, brain pressing painfully against the inner-workings of his skull, Prince Daeron sits up in bed, sheets of soft linen and silk pooling over his lap. Bright, golden sun streams between the geometric tracery of the large windows. He winces at the light, puffing out a breath to blow a strand of hair out of his face. Waking up in an unfamiliar room in the Old Palace of Sunspear made his eyes sting even more, let alone waking from another vivid dream.

Although this dream was different.

There was less blood and fire. Fewer haunting screams.

He had awoken—albeit with a nauseating headache he had since become accustomed to—with a soft glow in his chest, an insistent warmth that made him reach to the table beside the bed and grab one of the four bottles of Dornish red. He examined it carefully: was there something different in this that made him dream of sunshine and smiles?

His dream was so different. Stranded somewhere amongst the rolling sand hills of the central Dornish desert, he had wandered aimlessly, but desperately, dragging his body through visible waves of heat. At least, it felt like it was him, but he was unsure. Wings weighed him down: large, black and scaly, but he couldn’t fly. He remembers the pain and the weight as he began sinking further and further into the scorching sand, gold and glitter racing for miles in either direction, swirling around his head like a flurry of birds. And that’s when he saw it, burning red eyes alighting on a blur of blue and green. An oasis, lush amongst the desert, bursting from the sand in a shower of gold.

His dreamstate crawled on all fours, pale skin red-raw by the time he reached the banks of the oasis. The water was the brightest blue he had ever seen, but he could not see his reflection in it. Instead, he saw a different face, a kind face, a beautiful face staring back at him. A woman smiling up at him through the rippling of the cool water.

She spoke to him, but no words came out.

Instead, the sound of bubbles and waves lapping gently against sand.

A clawed hand reached into the oasis pool, searching for the woman beneath the surface. The chill of the water soothed his burns, red disappearing from his skin. His claws vanished too, and he could see the clear crescents of his fingernails, the lines of his knuckles, the veins on the back of his hands. So human beneath the surface.

The woman watched him curiously, eyes shiny like pearls. Then, his hurt lurched and filled with warmth as she shifted upwards, towards the tension of the water’s surface. Up, up, up, and Daeron bent down to meet her. Her lips brushed the surface of the water—

And that’s when he woke up.

Daeron tosses the empty bottle of Dornish red aside. Stupid dreams. There wasn’t even anything useful in that one.

He wanders the warm, breezy halls of the glamorous old palace slightly more sober than he wishes to be. Maids and servants peer awkwardly at him, and he notices. He notices the looks of pity on their faces at the sand-blond hair falling messily on either side of his face, and the dark rings beneath his eyes. His mouth is painfully dry, so he heads into the main hall where his father sits with his Dornish relatives.

Maekar looks up. “You look like shit.”

Daeron slumps onto the nearest chaise and grabs a handful of pomegranate arils, tossing them into his mouth. He speaks with his mouth full, “I feel it.”

A few Dornish noblemen snicker around the vast wooden table, and Maekar just looks at his eldest son with a heavy dent in his brow. Daeron shrugs at him and accepts a goblet full of lemon water from a serving boy. Pity it wasn’t alcoholic.

“We have been here for one night already,” Maekar says blandly. “I expect you to spend some time doing something other than drinking.”

Daeron opens his mouth to speak.

“Or whoring, for that matter.”

Daeron closes his mouth and rolls his eyes.

Nearby, a Dornish noblewoman—a second cousin or something, Daeron cannot remember—offers the two Targaryens a polite smile, attempting to dissipate the slowly building tension across the table. “Our gardens are lovely this time of year. You were but a child when you explored them last.”

Daeron looks to her with mild disinterest, the burn in his eyes seeming to worsen at the way the sun caught the gold of her jewellery. Going outside in his state was not something he wanted to do. At all. But he spares a glance towards his father at the opposite end of the table and feels, for the first time in a long time, a pang of guilt. Small, but there. Maekar ran his fingers through his white-blond beard thoughtfully, but his eyes were sad.

Daeron sighs. He quickly shoves a couple of stuffed grape leaves into his mouth, downs the rest of his lemon water, and then pushes himself to his feet. He bows his head politely at the small number of people gathered around the table.

“If you’ll excuse me, then, I shall go and… explore the gardens.”

He takes his leave.

Bitterly, he realises the noblewoman was right. The gardens are brilliant, growing neatly amongst tiny streams of trickling water, plants blossoming in oranges, yellows and pinks. There’s a honey-sweet smell lingering in the air too, and bees flitter from one plant to another. There is green everywhere, trees swaying gently beneath a small breeze, the colours stark against the sandy beige of the castle’s high walls.

The sun isn’t too bad on his eyes, but he finds himself squinting still. The sun causes sweat to bead on his hairline too. Heated, he bats more strands of hair away from his face. Then, to add to the tickling frustration of his hair in his eyes, a fucking bug flies directly into his face. Daeron splutters, batting at the insect as it hovers around him. That’s when he hears a quiet giggle behind him, and he turns to see—

“Oh, I’m sorry, my prince,” you say quickly, realising you have been seen. Sitting beneath a fruiting tree, you clamber to your feet and bow. “I was… I did not mean—”

Daeron cannot speak. It is you, clear as day, free from the rippling surface of an oasis pool. His mouth opens dumbly as he watches you fumble over your words. He manages to smack the flying insect away from his face as he stares.

“I meant no disrespect,” you finally manage, still deep in a bow.

He still does not speak. His heart roars in his chest, thumping painfully against his sternum as he watches you smooth the soft, slightly crinkled fabric of your dress. He feels breathless and, suddenly, the most drunk he’s ever been despite the Dornish red long gone from his system.

You look up when the prince says nothing. You peer at him politely but curiously, not quite grasping the silence that has fallen between you.

You approach carefully, aware of several armed guards milling around the wall’s edges. “My prince?”

“I—” Daeron begins, then clears his throat. “Who are you?”

You introduce yourself by name, voice velvet in Daeron’s undoubtedly red ears. A noblewoman from a house he vaguely recognises the name of from his father and uncle’s many travels across the kingdoms. And, gods, you are the prettiest thing he has ever seen. Shimmering eyes, fluttering lashes, a charming smile that stretches across your beautiful face. And you’re wearing a blue dress, as blue as fresh oasis water, that makes you look dream-like in his sun-glared vision.

“Well, my lady,” Daeron manages to greet despite the squeezing in his chest. “I am glad you find my struggles humorous.”

You smile when you hear the hilarity in his voice. “It must be your hair, my prince.”

He steps closer to you and cocks his head to the side, the pair of you now standing beneath the shade of the tall lemon tree. “My hair?”

You nod. “It is the colour of honey, is it not? The bees clearly love it.”

Then, you reach forward and take a free strand of his hair between your fingers and tuck it tenderly behind his ear. He nearly closes his eyes at the heat that emits from you and the full body shudder that threatens to rack through him at your touch (he also chooses to ignore the twitch of his cock in his breeches, blaming it on the heat and post-drunkenness). Just as suddenly as the action had occurred, it ceased—you snap your hand back to your side, a vivid expression of shock passing over your lovely features.

“Oh, gods, my prince, please forgive me,” you mutter and take a step back. “I don’t—”

Daeron chuckles. “Do not fret. I suppose my hair is rather unruly today. Perhaps I should tie it back?”

He has no ribbon to tie it with.

But you do.

He watches, unashamed, as you smile and pull a small, thin blue ribbon from inside the bodice of your dress. His eyes catch the curve of your breasts, the supple dip into the stretched neckline as you pull the ribbon out with your fingers. His cock twitches again. The prince manages to snap his eyes back to you when you extend your arm and offer him the ribbon. You seem to lack the shyness of the other visiting noblewomen who walk the long corridors in Sunspear, but there is still a visible nervousness beneath your smile.

“I have a spare,” you tell him.

He peers at the silken material thoughtfully. He almost feels sober now.

“Would you tie it for me?” He decides to test the waters of his oasis. “I find this heat makes me… less than precise.”

Not technically a lie, he tells himself. He is more than capable of bringing his hair out of his face, but seeing the way your face flickers with uncertainty, overwhelmed with curiosity, is too good to resist. He inclines his head in your direction, silently begging for a response.

Your eyes drop. “My prince—”

“It is but a simple request to help your prince.” Gods, he sounds too much like his younger brother. It makes his stomach churn. The feeling is soon quelled, however, when you raise your pretty eyes and take a step closer to him.

He turns and bends his knees to accommodate you.

Gently, as if handling a vessel of glass, or perhaps a wild animal, you gather the tousled locks of his honey-blond hair and slip the ribbon around it. Your fingers brush the nape of his neck as he screws his eyes shut, a pained breath passing out of his nose. He burns up at your touch and his cock is definitely half-hard now. He wonders if you can feel the heat of his skin, hot like a branding iron. You expertly tie the ribbon and secure his hair away from his face, and he almost whimpers when your hands withdraw.

“Perfect,” you say cheerfully. “Although, blue is not really your colour, is it, my prince?”

Daeron turns. “Huh?”

“The Targaryens,” you begin. “Red and black. Blood and ash, I suppose. The blue is slightly out of place, I’m afraid.”

He doesn’t care.

“Is it your colour?” He asks instead.

“Well, I always match my ribbons to my dresses.”

Of course you do.

You run your hands down the blue fabric of your airy dress, and Daeron admires the way the light breeze picks at the hemline and makes it flutter. Then, you sigh wistfully, and look back up at the prince before you, who continues to watch you carefully, eyes thinking, as if he knows you from somewhere. There’s recognition in his light irises.

A voice from somewhere beyond the gardens calls for you. Daeron frowns.

You sigh again, but this time it is heavy. “Apologies, my prince, but I must depart.” Then, you bow, and turn and leave before Daeron can so much as open his mouth in reply. You leave behind a scent of citrus and honey and something fresh. Clean water, lush gardens. His heart aches in his chest, blood pumping hot inside him.

And his cock is still half hard.

“Fucking ridiculous…” he mutters to himself, pressing his palm to the front of his trousers with a low hiss.

He needs a drink.

—✿—

He doesn’t see you again that day, and it makes him…

Sad?

He does not know how he feels, but he knows something is wrong when he politely declines the advances of a stunning Dornish girl later that night. Instead, he leans against the wall of his chambers, burning forehead pressed against cool stone, two now-empty bottles of Dornish red rolling on the floor nearby.

He has your ribbon in his hand, wrapped around his fist as he strokes his cock, tip angry and red and drooling as your face swims around his brain. Your eyes, your mouth, your fingers, your smell. Daeron groans desperately around a drunken hiccup, hips thrusting to meet the movements of his hand. He utters your name into the emptiness of his chambers and spills himself over his knuckles and the intricately woven rug beneath his feet. He soils your ribbon too, and his heart pangs. Unsteady on his feet, he stumbles over to his wash basin and quickly rinses his seed from the shining blue.

He falls asleep with it drying in his hand.

And he dreams of you again.

He’s in the desert, but this time, he knows where to go. He’s never had a dream like this, where he can control so much of what he—is it him?—does. It feels less prophetic this way, and that scares him. The half-man, half-dragon crawls to the oasis but he cannot fling himself into the water. He roars desperately, scrambling against the sand, an invisible wall preventing him from moving any further than sticking one clawed hand beneath the tiny waves. But you still smile at him, and when you approach the surface, your face appears clearer and your eyes sparkle brighter and—

Daeron wakes with a start.

“Fuck!” He can’t help but shout into the stillness of his chambers. He regrets it when it shoots a fierce pain into the back of his eyes.

He tucks your ribbon into the waistband of his trousers, letting his hair fall messily to his shoulders as he hurries through the halls of the palace again. He bypasses the great hall and enters the gardens, but you are not there. Entering the great hall, he ignores the curious glances of his cousins and siblings as his gaze spins around the room. Maekar is not there, but neither are you.

“You have risen early,” Valarr comments.

Daeron calms himself. He cannot just ask for you. “Where is my father?”

Valarr gestures to the way Daeron just came. “Somewhere.”

“How helpful,” he mumbles sarcastically, then leaves the great hall, ignoring the warm aching in his chest that he will, once again, blame on the Dornish wine.

—✿—

Nothing of you the next day, either. He searches the entire palace, it feels like.

Aerion asks him if he’s mentally unwell when he disregards another offer of sex from a pretty girl. Daeron ignores him, and returns to his chambers. There are three bottles of Dornish red already waiting for him, but he doesn’t touch them. Instead, he all but throws himself into his bed and wills himself to sleep, the sun still setting and bathing him in gold and crimson.

He dreams of you differently.

He’s under the water and you kneel on the sandy banks, blue dress blurring at the edges as if you were made from the desert that surrounded you. You reach for him, your hand finding his face, cool and comforting against the blazing heat of his cheek. But the dragon fights to bite her, and when his teeth sink into the flesh of her hand, a sharp pain rips through him. Yet she is not the one screaming, he is.

And then he wakes and uncorks the nearest bottle of wine.

Later, he feels lucky that his drunken prayers have been answered when he finally spots you. You chat happily to a few lesser noblewomen, lounging in a gathering of plush pillows. Daeron feels something prideful swell in his chest. He watches you bring a segment of blood orange to your mouth, the juices glistening over your lips as you talk and eat.

But glued to his father’s side, he cannot speak with you.

And this becomes a recurring nightmare of his.

Over the course of several days, he watches you from afar. While discussing realm politics with Valarr and several royal Dornishmen, he becomes unfocussed as you laugh and gossip with his younger sisters, speaking of brilliant puppet shows with fire and smoke. While being insulted in conversation by his younger brother, his eyes find you as you stand outside a window, the light catching in your hair, your ribbons matching the light green of your dress. While he attempts pathetically to keep up with his father’s instructions, he watches you dismount a large mare, your skirts floating around you, a smile etched deep onto your face, eyes sparkling as you say something quietly to the stable boy.

Prince Daeron is following you, a mere lady, around Sunspear like a puppy. He finds himself lingering in doorways, listening to your conversations, or leaning against the thick trunk of a tree, hiding as you and your ladies hurry past him to head into the gardens. He enjoys the way he can smell your sweet scent hanging in the airy hallways a few seconds after you pass by, and he especially likes the way the ribbon he has still smells like you too, even despite the several washes it has endured.

And which he is not proud of.

—✿—

He dreams of you again the night before he is set to depart back to King’s Landing with his family. He fell asleep only half-drunk on red, and now you are back beneath the surface of his dream oasis. His hand finds your face, and he wills himself to pull you from the depths. Bring you up, rescue you, kiss the water from your lungs. And so you rise, and your lips break the surface of the water for the very first time and he kisses you.

Dragon tongue searching, splitting, invading. It burns the inside of your mouth and he hisses, serpent-like. You emerge from the water, nose and eyes following until your entire face is presented to him. He kisses you and you kiss him back.

And so he wakes with an achingly hard cock, sticky against his bare thighs. His fingers trace the length and he hisses, blood pumping like raw fire beneath the velvet skin. His entire body is slick with sweat too, and so he throws off the covers, slides tunic on, and stumbles out of his room in search of fresh air. He’s stifling.

Instead, he stumbles directly into you.

You yelp in shock as his warm body collides with yours, large hands reaching out to grab your hips, preventing you from falling backwards. He groans when your hands, cool from prolonged exposure to the night air, find his chest and the thin linen of his night tunic. His eyes find your face, and he wishes he could kiss you.

“My prince!” You exclaim, head whipping side-to-side to check the shadowed expanse of the hallway. You continue to touch his chest. “Are you alright? Are you ill?”

Instinctively, you press the back of your hand to his forehead. Daeron groans again, eyes screwing shut and mouth dropping open. You peel your hand away as if his skin had scolded you.

“You’re burning,” you remark.

“I dreamt of you,” he says in return, voice whinier than he intended.

You pause. The silence is deafening save for Daeron’s ragged breathing and the distant voices of the kingsguard nightshift.

“What?” You finally whisper.

“Every night, I have dreamt of you. I dreamt of you before I met you,” he whispers, opening his eyes now. “You are… you’re an oasis. My oasis.”

You frown, but not in displeasure. Moreso confusion. “I… don’t understand, my prince.”

“You plague my mind like something fierce. I cannot… gods, I cannot rid myself of you,” he utters and his hands tighten on your hips, thumbs smoothing over the mound of the bone beneath skin and flesh and fabric. “My mind is consumed only by you. You—you are mine, my lady. You are supposed to be mine.”

You gape at him, hyper-aware of his closeness. You can smell the rich spices of wine on his breath, but there is a clarity in his eyes that frightens you. It sends a thrill down your spine, and the slight buzz of your own nightly endeavours—sipping spiced wine with your ladies in the darkness of the gardens—adds to the feeling blooming in your lower belly. A heat pooling there, sparking like a blade on steel.

“My prince—” you say quietly.

“Daeron.”

“Daeron,” you whisper, and he groans.

“Let me have you,” he leans forward to whisper against your cheek, nuzzling his nose across your face until he can brush his lips against the lobe of your ear. “Let me show you how much I need you.” 

Because I need you like water, he almost says.

You feel yourself heating up. “You are surely drunk…”

“There is no drink left in my blood,” he tells you quickly. “I need you.”

He says your name, then kisses your cheek. He kisses where your pulse hammers in your neck. He kisses the sensitive spot on the edge of your throat.

You take one hand and slowly, gently, reach to grasp the back of his head, threading your fingers in his hair. He whines out as you angle his head back to you and slot your mouth against his, whispering just before your lips touch: “You have me.”

Daeron groans as your tongues meet, and he pulls you back through the doorway of his chambers. You taste the wine on his tongue, and you’re sure he can taste it on yours too. You close the door carefully behind you, fumbling slightly as his hands caress your sides, fondling the dips of your hips, the curve of your arse, the bend in your spine. He’s an incessant press to your front, too, with his hardening cock rucking against your clothed pelvis. He whines something quiet against your lips as he strains against his breeches, a small wet patch growing in the white, nearly transparently thin fabric.

You release his hair to tug at the material of his tunic. He breaks the kiss with a growl, tossing the shirt over his head before glueing his mouth back to yours. Your hands find the warm flesh of his pecs, giving them a squeeze, your thumbs running over his nipples.

“Ah—” he breathes out against your lips.

His strong hands pin you to the closed door, one reaching to ruck your skirts out of the way so he can seize your thigh, pulling it up for you to wrap around his waist. With this new angle, he grinds himself against you, clothed cock rubbing over the delicate fabric of your own undergarments, sliding over the heat of your covered core. There, you are hot and slick, and Daeron groans into your mouth, pulling away to look down at you.

“You’re the most beautiful woman I have ever laid eyes on,” he tells you, other hand reaching beneath your skirts to press a palm flat to your covered core. You draw in a breath and he kisses the tip of your nose. “And you’re mine.”

The prince’s hand slips beneath the fabric.

“Daeron,” you whisper, mouthing at his jaw as the coarse pads of his fingers find your wet cunt. A whimper follows as he parts you with two fingers, running them up and down your folds as you bite down on the junction of his neck.

“I’ve got you.” He flinches at the bite, but his fingers do not cease, and one soon finds the swollen pearl of your clit. He draws a tight circle, clumsy the first few ministrations, but he rapidly finds and settles into a rhythm as you nibble along his neck and shoulder.

After a few circles, he draws his fingers back down your slit, gathering moisture before his pointer and middle find your hole. You draw in a tight breath at the small pressure he exerts, and you flop your head back to find him already looking down at you. Silently, you nod and, eyes locked, he pushes two slick fingers into the tight clutch of your cunt. With a flutter of your eyelashes, your eyes close, and Daeron leans in to kiss the moan from your lips. He licks over your teeth and tongue as he gently pushes himself into the first joints, then the second, your pussy opening for him like he always knew it would. Soon, his knuckles press to the soft flesh of your inner thighs and you’re moaning his name into his mouth like an incantation.

“Shh, there we go, we’re all done,” Daeron shushes you softly, kissing the corner of your mouth. 

Your hands find his back and you grip at the strong muscle there. His skin is burning beneath your touch, and you wonder if he is actually becoming ill. The thought is wiped from your mind, however, when the prince pulls his fingers out of your cunt and then forces them back inside, curling them just the right amount to have you crying out. 

He responds to your cat-like yowl with another intimate coo, “S’alright, s’alright. Be good for me, my lady. Taking it so well, aren’t you?”

He fucks his fingers into you repeatedly. Your nails scratch lurid red lines down his back as he splits you apart over his knuckles. Slick runs down the back of his hand, and his cock twitches as he feels a rivulet run along the inside of his wrist.

You’ve never felt like this before. A sticky warmth spreads through your chest like honey, and something bludgeoning rears itself in the pit of your belly. A fuzzy tingle appears at the base of your spine too, and it makes you whine, your hips jerking forward to meet his movements. 

Daeron groans, pinning you to the door with his front and managing to use his free hand to yank down the neckline of your dress. You hear a resounding tear as he pulls your breasts free of your dress and chemise. The cool air of his dark chambers pebbles your nipples, but he’s quick to suck one of them into his mouth without warning. You yelp as he sucks harshly, your fingers finding his blond locks again and pulling.

He withdraws with a whimper and a wet pop, a glistening string of saliva connecting from his bottom lip to the bud of your nipple. It snaps when you push his head to the other breast, and he obeys, drawing the other into his mouth as he continues to scissor his fingers into the wet heat of your cunt. The sounds are obscene and wet, ringing in your ears like bells.

The heavy feeling in your belly grows tenfold at the dual sensation.

“Daeron,” you mewl, and the piteous sound has Daeron—rather reluctantly—tearing himself away from your breasts. He gives your nipple one last chaste kiss for good measure though. You huff. “Feel… I feel something.”

The prince straightens and kisses you softly. “Yeah? Feeling something in here?”

His hand drops and presses to your lower belly, your womb, and you nod at the pleasant warmth the pressure spreads through your core. Just as you nod, he withdraws his fingers, and the emptiness is like a slap to the face, the cool air bracing and sending goosebumps in trails over your legs. Before you can complain, he drops to his knees, kissing your breasts on the way down, dropping your leg gently. 

You feel him guide your legs apart at the knee as he gathers your skirts.

“If you would be so kind…” He offers them to you, and you clutch the luxurious fabric between trembling fingers. You watch him curiously as he smiles, lopsided and lax. He then ducks his head between your legs, kissing and licking up the ticklish skin of your thighs.

“What—? Oh—” You choke on your gasp as his hot mouth presses to your drooling cunt, his tongue flat and solid through the softness of your folds.

Daeron whines into you, a real trill that is embarrassingly unbecoming in his mind, but makes you clench around nothing. 

You taste of the heavens. You taste of you. Of a citrusy tang, a subtle honey sweetness, of the cleanest spring water. His oasis.

And you grip his golden hair, that heavy pleasure in your belly fills you once more as his tongue circles the rim of your hole and then—“Oh, fucking gods, Daeron”—presses inside you. The feeling is foreign, but welcome, and you gasp and moan as ecstasy seizes you in a white-knuckled grip. Your legs shake, tremble, the haze of the night’s spiced wine dissipating as the feeling of his mouth on you overtakes every functioning part of your brain. You no doubt sound like a wounded animal: whimpering and whining in high-pitched chirrups, grinding yourself onto his mouth.

Daeron has a hand on his painfully hard cock. He blindly pulls his breeches down, cock slapping up against his slightly hunched abdomen. He groans into your warmth as he fists himself, several beads of pre-cum dribbling out and smearing beneath his enclosed palm. You sound breathtaking above him, the heat beneath your skirts burning his cheeks a blazing red. In his pleasured stupor, he manages to bring his free hand up to your pussy and spread his fingers lightly over your clit as he continues to curl his tongue inside of you.

You jerk against him. There’s a knot in your tummy. “My prince.”

Daeron hums into you, unrelenting. His fingers press harder to your clit.

You sob out a moan, tears pricking at the corners of your eyes as your legs quiver and your stomach contracts. Then, something snaps inside you, and the sun seems to bloom from your chest like a yellow rose.

You release into Daeron’s mouth, and he closes his eyes in pure bliss as he laps it up with unwavering curls of his tongue, beckoning more from you with small presses of his fingers to your clit. He mutters your name against your folds before he pulls back, the lower portion of his face shining with your release.

The back of your head leans against the door as the prince gathers himself, kicking his breeches away. Your dress is gathered unflatteringly at your waist, and you continue to hold your skirts in a steadily loosening grip as pleasure lazes through your muscles. But Daeron is back on you in an instant, slotting his mouth to yours as he takes your leg again and hikes it back onto his hip. You are ripped from the rapture of your release by the warm length of his cock pressing against your slick, aching core. Fingers release his golden hair to grab at his shoulders for stability, your tongues intertwining.

You taste yourself on him.

“My lady,” he utters, kissing your cheek, wetness smearing over the warm skin. “My love, will you have me? Will you—” he gently ruts his hips back and forth, sliding his cock through the wet split of your cunt. “—let me have you?”

“Yes,” you gasp quickly, but fear bleeds into your subconscious.

He mellows you with the softest kiss of the night. His lips are an affectionate comfort before he whispers your name and says, “You were made for me, made for this. You are mine.”

The prince, your prince, slides his tongue back into your mouth to muffle your light whimpers as his hand guides his cock to your pussy, running up and down, gathering the heady mix of your release and his saliva: the mix you could still taste on his tongue.

He notches the reddened head of his cock at your hole. A hiss escapes him. Dragon-like in sound, but he withholds a full groan as he presses in with a shift of his hips. He lets go of his cock to help in holding up your skirts as he eases into you, splitting you apart against the door of his chambers. You are damp with sweat beneath your dress and chemise, the back of your neck hot as you fail to keep up with his kiss. Moans roll from your tongue and get caught between his teeth, and he drags himself away to lick over your jaw as he enters you.

Slow, gentle.

“Fuck, fuck, fuck,” Daeron whispers into your neck. His balls tense as he bottoms out inside you, and the base of his abdomen clenches with the effort of holding himself still. This was perhaps the first time he was thankful he was not completely drunk, or he would have spilled the moment your sweet pussy clutched around his thick cock.

You whimper at the pain lingering behind the euphoria, hands scrambling for purchase down his back. “Daeron.”

Daeron sucks and licks the sweat from your exposed shoulder before he starts to move, listening to your heavy breathing. He holds you as he pulls back, then pushes in. Slowly, patiently.

Clearly, his chivalry was not appreciated.

“Daeron,” you say louder. “Please, I need you to go faster.”

Your prince pulls out and then pushes back in as his teeth sink into your shoulder. You cry out, the sound echoing around his chambers, as he drives into you, over and over. The thickness of his cock spreads you like nothing you’ve ever experienced, and you feel as though you can feel him nudging up towards your womb. It’s intoxicating, and his tongue circling now at your pulsepoint has you keening into his warm touch, nails once again digging into his bare back.

You call for him, and he’s on you in an instant, sliding his tongue back into your mouth to tangle with yours. You nip at his bottom lip. He smiles.

“You have haunted my dreams for days,” he tells you honestly, fucking you all the while. “They say my dreams will drive me mad, but how am I to be driven to madness when I dream so often of you?”

You kiss the corner of his mouth and whimper.

He continues. “My oasis in the desert. I need you, sweet girl. You must let me have you.”

His cock slams into that perfect spot inside you that has your back arching off of the solid wood of the door. You hold him tightly and moan like a whore, loud and unabashed, as he aids your movements, tugging you down to meet the thrusts of his hips. He loves the way you sound, but he needs you to speak to him. He loves your voice more.

“Say it,” he begs. “Say you’re mine. Say you will not let me drown.”

You don’t understand that last part, but you find yourself nodding deliriously anyway. Once again, your fingers find his hair and you tug tightly at the loose strands. He whimpers, eyes closing for a moment, tongue pressing to his bottom lip as his thrusts falter.

“I’m yours, my prince,” you say breathlessly. “Gods, I’m yours.”

His eyes snap open.

“Yes,” he whines out. “Say it again.”

“I’m yours,” you moan as his thrusts increase in pace, and his ruts become desperate as he fills you. Your legs start to shake again, and the pressure in your belly returns, and now you know exactly what that means.

“You’re mine, all mine,” Daeron mutters, more to himself than to you. He follows with an even quieter, “And this pretty cunt, all fuckin’ mine.”

You pull him from whatever trance-like state your pussy has entrapped him in, his eyes glassy. Over a moan, you plead, “Daeron, please, I’m so close…”

He redoubles his efforts like a man possessed. “Yeah?” 

Then his hand snakes downward and finds your clit once more. He pinches it, the bastard, and you yowl as he rubs tender circles in the wake of the pain, your exclamation tapering off into a simpering whine. He chuckles, and you realise you had forgotten he was a Targaryen.

“I want to feel you,” he says. “I want to feel you come undone on my cock.”

“Daeron.”

“Come on, my love, give it to me. Give me what I dreamed of.”

With one last desperate whine, the knot inside you snaps and you come around his cock. Your pussy clenches around him and it feels even better than releasing around his fingers. Your nails drag down his back, probably drawing blood, as you moan out his name. Your pussy spasms around the thick of his cock, clit racing with your heartbeat, pleasure bursting from every pore as your high rockets through you. Daeron fucks you through it, panting while watching the way your face flickers and changes as you crest your high and begin to fall. He holds you still as you whimper, your slick dripping down your inner thighs as he maintains his pace.

“Good girl, good girl,” he praises, drunk on pleasure. “That’s a good girl.”

You whine for your prince. You whisper when his pace begins to stutter, “Spill inside me, please—I need you to fill me.”

You don’t know where that came from, but it does something. A moan so raw rips from Daeron’s throat that you think he’s in pain. But instead, he comes inside you, the tip of his cock shoved right up towards the plug of your womb. His head falls forward and he continues his moans against your shoulder, now muffled, as his hips continue to rut.

He says something you don’t hear. “It’ll take. I need it to take.”

Instead, you press a kiss to his cheek when his movements finally stop. Slowly, gingerly, the two of you part: the prince pulls his cock from you and you gasp as seed and slick drool out of you like honey from a dipper. Daeron, almost panicked in his light-eyed gaze, dips down to collect it with two fingers, pushing it back inside you. One handed, he also helps pull the rest of your dress up and over your head. You help him wordlessly with tired arms.

He clears his throat as he places a tender kiss on your stomach. “Will you spend the night here, my lady?”

You stroke his hair as he continues to bend, fingers crooked into your cunt. “Do you wish for me to?”

He replies before your lips stop moving. “Yes. Please. If you, uh, if you wish.”

You urge him up with another tug to his hair. He whines, and obeys, fingers leaving the warmth of your pussy as you place a caring kiss to his slightly bruised lips.

“I would like nothing more,” you tell him, then suck your shared release off of his fingers.

That night, you curl in comfortably at his side, head resting against his chest. Daeron falls asleep with a smile on his face and three untouched bottles of Dornish red at his bedside. 

And he dreams of you. Well, he thinks he does.

A black dragon drinks from a desert oasis as plants begin to bloom around him. Dense, brilliantly green shrubs and trees sprout from the arid sand as the sky-blue water of the pool sparkles beneath the sun. The dragon laps at the cool water as rivers begin to form, and more and more jungle surges out from beneath the golden dunes until the sand becomes grass and trees brush the cloudless sky.

You wake before him, the sun rising in pinks and blues outside. You press a kiss to his chest, where it rises and falls slowly, and nuzzle into him.

Under the sheets, your hand finds something, and you pull your blue ribbon out from beneath you. You smile softly, gripping it in your hand as sleep finds you once more.

———

Your shop is rather small, but you love it.

Behind the sturdy wooden counter—which itself is laden with misshapen plants sprouting from old teacups and half-filled bottles of sparkling powder—sits rows upon rows of shelves. The shelves are stocked full of your natural remedies and creations, vials big and small, pouches of linen and pouches of ribboned silk. You have everything, perfectly organised, by remedy and in alphabetical order.

For years, you’ve operated out of your little shop in a narrow side-street in the heart of King’s Landing, just a stone’s throw from the main thoroughfare. You’ve helped countless travellers and residents with a range of issues: from sedatives for unruly hounds and salves to treat festering hoof-rot, to fast-acting contraceptives and bitter-tasting hallucinogens.

You can make anything.

And because you can make anything, you’ve become familiar with many a noble and knight in your time.

The door to your shop opens as you’re serving a little old lady, handing her a parcel of dried mushrooms. A cool breeze smelling faintly of winter rain and freshly baked bread sweeps into your shop, jostling the bundles of herbs you have hanging from your ceiling. You wave goodbye to the elderly women as you look up, smiling politely as you catch the unmistakable glint of midday sun against white armour.

“Ser Donnel,” you greet with a small bow of your head as the older kingsguard enters your shop, his gleaming armour making him appear like a pearl in the sand amongst your dim wooden shelves. “How is your finger? I trust the salve I made you helped the wound heal?”

Ser Donnel approaches the counter, offering you a small smile as he lifts his hand. He flexes his fingers, eyes lingering on the index, which he had sliced open a week prior.

“It did, thank you,” Ser Donnel says, his eyes lingering now on the shelves behind you.

“What can I do for you?” You ask, drumming your fingers on the solid wood of your counter, watching as the older knight spins slowly on his heel, taking in the other shelves and tables packed into your small shop.

“Don’t suppose you have something for horses?” He asks, back to you. When he turns, however, he gives you a rueful smile, then laughs. “Of course you do.”

“Of course I do,” you mimic, rounding your counter and leading the older knight across the room. You find a shelf near the shop’s far side, gesturing to an array of small vials, many labelled “Dog – Rash” or “Cat – Sneezing” and even “Chicken – Eggbound.” Ser Donnel looks at the array of small vials with complete amazement as you turn back to him. “What’s wrong with your palfrey, ser?”

Ser Donnel points to his own eye for emphasis. “Got something in her eye. All red and weepy and that. Not pleasant.”

“I see,” you say, then turn to your shelf. It takes you less than a second before you’re plucking a vial with dark brown glass off of the shelf. You hold it out to Ser Donnel. “Sounds like conjunctivitis. Very common, and, lucky for you, easy to treat. Just a few drops of this, morning and night, and she should be all better in a couple of days.”

Ser Donnel looks at you, visibly pleased, as you gently press the small vial into his palm. “You’re an absolute darling, you know that?”

“I try,” you reply, smiling as you return to your counter. Ser Donnel follows you, dropping the vial into a pouch and pulling out his coin purse at the same time. He drops several stags onto the counter, and you gape at him as they clatter loudly against the wood. “Ser Donnel, this is too much—”

“For the eye-drops,” Ser Donnel insists, pushing the stags towards you. “And for your services, okay? Now, I don’t want to hear another word of it.”

You bite your lip, hiding your smile as you reluctantly scoop up the stags and slip them into the coin pouch on your belt.

“Well, can I at least give you something for your generosity?” You ask, ducking beneath the counter before he could even open his mouth to reply. You snatch up a small pouch and get to your feet, offering it to the knight, who peers at you as if you had grown another head. You sigh through your nose, amused. “Sourleaf. Fresh in this morning.”

Ser Donnel offers you another kind smile, taking the pouch of painkillers and slipping it alongside the pouch with the vial.

“Thank you,” he says, bowing his head, just as the door to your shop opens and another gust of wind blows in.

The cold breeze sweeps through the store, and the door bangs harshly against the side wall, creaking on its hinges from the force. You startle, and Ser Donnel whips around. Composing yourself, you’re quick to sink back, making yourself appear smaller, as Aerion Targaryen bursts into the room with eyes spitting embers.

“How long could it possibly take to buy an ointment for a fucking horse?” The prince seethes as he steps into the shop, looking around with genuine distaste. His eyes linger on a murky liquid in a large bottle on the wall beside him, before they drag through the dim to Ser Donnel. He makes a face, eyebrows raising like he’s expecting something. “Well? Did you get it?”

You hear Ser Donnel release a short, quiet breath.

“Yes, your grace,” he says, glancing back over his shoulder sympathetically before stepping towards the prince. “We may be off now.”

Aerion scoffs, allowing Ser Donnel to brush past him, but his eyes lift and land on you. He peers at you, as if just noticing your presence, his gaze burning holes right through the centre of your face. He looks at you half with distaste—probably due to the leaves in your hair and the powder dusted across your arms and apron—and half with interest, like a merchant admiring a newly minted coin.

“So you are the woods witch Ser Donnel speaks so highly of…” Aerion comments, eyes unwavering in their stare. You shift your eyes to the floor. Aerion huffs, partially amused. “I expected an ugly old thing, but this—”

“Your grace,” Ser Donnel warns with a sternness akin to a strict father.

“—is unexpected,” Aerion continues, unphased. He traipses into the shop, cloak swishing behind him like a pair of raven’s wings. His eyes scan the walls of bottles and vials and jars, and he plucks a small one from the closest shelf. Spinning it between his fingers, he speaks with considerable disinterest, “How exactly do you know how to make all of this?”

You lift your head slowly, hands clasped in front of you. “My… my mother taught me, your grace.”

The vial he holds holds a sticky green liquid, the colour of forest moss. He peers at it strangely. The liquid inside sticks to the glass, viscous and slow-moving as he turns it.

“What’s this for?” He asks, and you know he doesn’t actually care. You lock eyes, and you realise he’s testing you.

“Eases infant colic,” you reply straight away.

Aerion drops the vial on the floor and it shatters against the wood. You flinch, startled by the sudden noise. You hear Ser Donnel protest with a gruff call of the prince’s title, but Aerion is undeterred, slipping behind the counter and appraising the towering shelves behind you. He takes another vial, the liquid inside a deep, mustard yellow.

“And this?”

“Inflamation caused by pox,” you answer. “Soothes the skin.”

He huffs, and drops that vial too. It shatters, but this time, you don’t flinch. You watch the syrupy yellow liquid leech between the floorboards, glass shimmering in the ghostly light streaming in through the only window near the door.

Aerion walks further behind the counter, and you shift until the small of your back is pressed to the solid wooden lip. The prince closes in on several vials on the very top shelf, and he has to stand on his toes to reach one of them. Your heart leaps into your throat, and you open your mouth to say something, but no words fall.

Aerion’s pale fingers snatch a small bottle from the top shelf. The glass is clear, and it’s labelless, but you know exactly what it is. The substance inside resembles wine: a deep, blood-red that bubbles a little on the surface as the prince sloshes the liquid around. There’s a small, oil-like sheen to it as he holds it up, violet eyes finding yours.

“What’s this?” He presses, and you wonder if he catches the fear in your eyes.

You clear your throat. “I, uh, it’s—”

He uncorks it, and you raise an arm.

“It’s a stimulant,” you blurt out, stopping yourself from pulling the vial from his hands. Aerion continues, unphased, as he lifts the bottle to his nose and sniffs. You can almost smell it yourself: overripe grapes, crushed honeysuckle, and what smells uncannily like the perfumed skin of an expensive courtesan. Aerion pauses, something flashing in his eyes as you continue shyly, “To… increase desire and maintain… maintain a man’s excitement.”

Aerion stares at you, slowly lowering the little bottle from his nose.

He holds it carelessly, and as Ser Donnel sends another warning from across the room, you attempt to prise the bottle from his fingers, your touch slow and gentle.

“Please be careful, your grace,” you utter, fingers skimming the cool glass of the vial. “It’s incredibly potent in large doses—”

Aerion jerks away, and you snap your hand back as though you’d been burned. 

The prince hisses at you, serpent-like as the pointed ivory of his teeth glint in the grey light. “Don’t you fucking dare.”

You withdraw. “Your grace, please—”

“You’re trying to scare me,” he seethes, shaking the bottle enough for a few droplets to flick out and onto the pale skin of his fingers. It stains like mulled wine. He continues, staring you down. “How dare you even—”

“Your grace,” Ser Donnel’s voice booms through the small room, and you find yourself cowering back against the counter, stuck between two brewing storms. Ser Donnel sighs loudly. “Listen to her. She knows a lot more than you do, believe me.”

Aerion lets out a bitter laugh. “Don’t mock me.”

You chime in hesitantly. “Please, your grace. It’s a concentrated mixture. I wouldn't want you to—”

“I can do what I want,” Aerion spits out, and before you can even react, he downs the entire vial in two quick mouthfuls.

You gasp out. “Your grace—!”

Aerion drops the vial and it shatters right at your feet. You jump back, avoiding the splash of broken glass, as the prince turns on his heel and makes for the door. You scramble after him, but you’re stopped by Ser Donnel, who places a gentle hand on your shoulder.

At the door, Aerion turns and gives you one last look, eyes trailing up and down your figure, before he rolls his eyes and vanishes back onto the street.

You’re breathing deeply, overcome with guilt. Ser Donnel strokes your shoulder gently, calming you.

“It’s alright, it’s his own doing,” Ser Donnel assures you, hand shifting up to pat you comfortingly on the cheek.

“But—he just—the entire thing.”

“Will it harm him?” Ser Donnel asks. His voice is firm and it almost makes you want to cry. “Will it kill him?”

You quickly shake your head. “No, ser! It—it will be very intense, and very, uh, difficult to remediate without—without help, but it will not harm him, no.”

“Can a cure be made?”

You feel yourself warming beneath your clothes, and you clear your throat, soothing your hands over your apron and your skirts.

“I suppose I can give you something to ease the racing heart,” you say quietly, ducking off to the side to pluck another small vial from a nearby shelf. You hand it to Ser Donnel. “Mix with hot water and it will ease the fast-moving heart, but I’m afraid… I’m afraid the other symptoms will have to be cured… in other avenues.”

Ser Donnel chuckles, taking the vial. “I suppose I’ll be taking him to the Street of Silk later tonight then?”

You offer Ser Donnel a sympathetic smile, nodding and trying to ignore the warmth in your belly. You put it down to the shock of the whole thing, and you give Ser Donnel a polite wave as he leaves your shop without another word.

You sigh, turning and examining the broken glass and spilled liquid across your floors. You grab your broom from near the door and set to work.

—✿—

Later that night, you’re setting a new set of vials on a shelf across the store, extinguishing the wall-mounted candles as you move. You hum to yourself, skirts brushing the dusty floor, the street beyond the small window empty and pitch-black as night falls across King’s Landing. A crescent moon hangs, thin and pale, above the horizon.

You take your apron off and place it neatly on a hook near the door behind the counter—the door which leads up a narrow flight of stairs to your home above. As you do this however, there’s a thud at the locked door. It rattles the old wood where it settles on its hinges, and your heart flutters a little in fright as you look over, spying a shadow through the stained glass. Taking a knife from a block behind you, you approach the door with your hand obscured behind your back.

There’s another thud. More like a knock this time.

“Are you alright?” You ask through the stained glass, the outer pane caked in grime kicked up from the street. You gently unbolt the door and open it a crack, peering out at the shadowed figure that hunches in your alcove. “I’m closed for the night, but if you are ill—”

“Let me in,” comes a familiar voice, and you squeak in fright when you recognise it. 

Quickly, you pull open the door, still holding your knife, and the shadowed figure slips into your shop. You close and bolt the door behind you, turning with your back to the surface as the figure drops his hood, and subsequently, his cloak, and you watch as Aerion Targaryen turns slowly as the thick black fabric pools at his feet.

“Your grace,” you mutter, dropping into a polite bow. Worry clenches tightly in your chest as the prince looks at you with narrowed eyes, features appearing gaunt in what remains of the shop’s fading candlelight. You spare a glance through the stained glass of the door, then through the pane of the window adjacent. “Your grace, I’m not sure if—”

“What have you done to me?” Aerion interrupts you, his question slicing through the nervous quiet like the blade you clutch. He takes a step forward and you suck in a startled gasp, slipping around him and hurrying towards your counter. You just want to put as much distance between him and you as possible. He groans when you breeze by him, slowly turning as he speaks, “You’ve poisoned me.”

You’re behind your counter now. “I’ve done no such thing.”

“You have,” Aerion hisses, and he takes another step forward. You notice he’s slightly wobbly on his feet, pitching forward chest-first as though his legs are too heavy. He catches himself on a nearby shelf, bottles clinking together as the wood trembles. “This is your fault. You’ve poisoned me. You’ve—you’ve cursed me.”

Your eyes grow wide. You shake your head. “Your grace, please, I would never.”

In the low candlelight, sweat sparkles like broken glass on Aerion’s forehead. His white-blond hair clings to his skin, damp near his temples, and there’s a dip in his brow that casts a dark shadow over his eyes. But when he cocks his head, staring you down, you see them flash violet in the ochre light, his pupils slowly expanding.

“Ser Donnel informed me of what I had taken, and what it would do to me,” Aerion mutters, his voice hoarse as he pushes himself off the shelf. His palms slam down on the counter directly across from you, and you take a step back, fingers tight on the bone handle of your knife. Aerion huffs, “So I drank your little tea for my heart, and I fucked a couple of whores, but nothing is working.”

You swallow, heart in your throat.

“I tried to sleep,” Aerion says, dragging himself around the counter. You mimic his actions on the other end, slipping to the other side to avoid him. He continues, one of his hands shifting to the thin buttoned tunic he’s wearing. He pops open the top button. “I tried to bathe, I tried to pleasure myself, and I went back to that fucking whorehouse twice more and nothing—” He groans, and undoes another button. “—is working. What have you done to me?”

Slowly, he exposes the pale, unblemished skin of his chest. He’s damp with sweat as you round the counter, skirts flowing around your ankles. Your heart hammers wildly in your chest as he advances on you lazily, eyes drawn to the movement of your body like a falcon.

“You drank the stimulant,” you tell him as gently as possible.

You’re at opposite ends of the counter now. He pauses, undoing another button.

“So it’s my fault?” Aerion hisses out. 

You watch as he pushes his hips against the lip of the counter and he groans, hoarse and animal-like from the back of his throat. It strings across a whimper, and heat floods your belly. You curse yourself, watching as the prince—the Targaryen prince Aerion Brightflame—ruts himself slowly against your counter. You can see the stimulant’s effects on him: the tent pitched in the front of his trousers, the beads of sweat that trek down beneath his now open-tunic, rolling between the grooves of his abdomen.

“Yes,” you say boldly, holding the knife. “You shouldn’t have drank it.”

Aerion huffs out, then groans again as he looks up at you, hips pressed firmly to the edge of the counter. “You’re a witch. Fix me.”

You release a shaky breath, then approach him. You move behind your counter, and he watches you with serpent-like concentration as you slowly place your knife onto the surface. He smirks at that, moving behind the counter too.

“You…” Your heart is wild beneath your ribs, and you can smell him as he nears. He smells expensive: smoked oud, honey-washed skin, patchouli incense from the Street of Silk. You smell sweat and wine too when he gets within a foot of you. You continue, “I cannot fix you, your grace. The easiest fix is to find… find a woman, or a man, I suppose, and engage in sexual intercourse until the effects wear off.”

You hope you sound confident enough. You fear you may faint as he looks you up and down, bare chest rising and falling, smoke trapped beneath shifting scales.

“This is your doing,” he says, seemingly ignoring your previous statement. One of his hands finds your hip and you seize up. “You will fix me. You will fix this.”

You find yourself shifting then as he pushes you up against the counter, the print of his hard cock pressing between your thighs as he pins you. You frown as he groans, the hand on your hip tightening while the other slowly rises to take your chin between his thumb and forefinger.

“I can’t fix it,” you whisper as he forces your eye contact. You’re trapped beneath him, but there’s a heat in your belly you can’t deny, and the pounding of your heart travels south, settling between your thighs despite your racing mind. “I, well, I can try and make a cure—”

“I don’t want an elixir or a salve or a bunch of dried fucking herbs,” Aerion utters as his fingers tighten on your jaw. He ruts his pelvis against your thigh, and you watch as something flits through his eyes, the black of his pupils having engulfed the violet of his irises. “I want you to fix me.”

You swallow. “Your grace—?”

“I want your mouth on my cock, and I want you bent over this fucking counter,” Aerion interrupts with a voice strewn through gravel, dark and hoarse. Something twists deep in your belly as he bends his head, dipping his nose against the curve of your jaw. He grunts when he inhales, lips vibrating against your skin when he speaks again. “Will that fix me?”

Your hands are tight around the edge of the counter. “Yes, your grace, but—”

Aerion hums, teeth just skimming the skin of your jaw before he pulls back. “Good. Then get on your knees.”

The heat of his body leaves yours then, and you blink up at the ceiling. Aerion Targaryen was telling you to get on your knees? Aerion Targaryen was currently pulling apart the knots of his trousers, panting like a wounded dog as he dips his hand into his breeches to fist himself? Your mind was a mess.

But you did what you were told. You could have easily overpowered him in this state. Simply leapt from his reach and locked yourself in your room. But you didn’t want to. There’s a heavy fire kindling in your belly, fanning out over your womb as blood pumps hot between your thighs.

You sigh gently, slowly pushing yourself off the counter and sinking to your knees, your powder-dusted skirts flowing out around you. The wooden ground is hard but well-worn from years of footfall, and you settle on your knees as the prince takes a step forward, his trousers gathered just beneath the curve of his arse. The print of his cock strains against the white linen of his breeches, the front wet with pre-cum, and the way his fingers tremble when he attempts to unknot them makes you whine.

“My prince…” you whisper, reaching your hands to take hold of the strings of his breeches. 

He stills above you, muscles in his abdomen clenching as you pull the knots apart. While you do this, one of his hands comes to rest on the back of your head, and he pulls you to him. Adrenaline is thick and viscous in your veins, but you let yourself be guided despite the hammering of your pulse up the side of your neck. You’re dizzy with both need and fear as you open your mouth and press it, hot and wet, to the front of his breeches.

He bites down a hiss. “That’s right.”

You kiss over the line of his cock, open-mouthed and messy against the soft linen. You smell perfume and imagine the skilled hands of trained sex workers pulling the prince’s breeches down for him. You squeeze your thighs together at the thought, and you finally manage to pull apart the knots beneath his navel.

“Kiss me, that’s it,” Aerion groans out, holding your head firmly as your lips move across his covered cock. He’s burning hot and rigid beneath the fabric, and your hands find his thighs as you lave your tongue. That earns you a groan, and your eyes flit upwards to find him already looking at you. His tongue darts out to wet his lips. “That’s it, fix me… fix this.”

Your head rocks beneath his hand as you mouth at his covered length. You feel him twitch beneath your lips, tip drooling out onto the fabric as you run the point of your tongue across it. Aerion hisses, hips bucking so harshly he knocks against your nose. Tears well along your waterline as he pulls you away then, just long enough to shove his breeches down.

He pulls his cock out, pale fingers wrapped tightly around the shaft. He groans at the raw contact, and you can’t help but gape as he clutches himself, tip a bruising red and wet with pre-cum. Pearlescent beads roll down the dip of his frenulum, and down his length as he slaps it against your cheek, then the other. He groans again when he pushes the tip across your lips, your eyes glassy as you watch him.

“Didn’t think witches could be as pretty as you,” he says suddenly as he ruts his cock along the warm lines of your face: over the curve of your cheekbones, rolling beneath the angle of your jaw. You kneel there, breathing hard, as he rubs himself over your skin. His words have heat flooding from your belly to your chest. The prince continues, “Might take you back to the Keep with me, huh? Keep you locked away…”

He tapers off when he groans, his balls drawing up tight. He grips the back of your head as he slides the head of his cock across your wet lips. He manages to bite out a quick “open” and you listen, opening your mouth and letting him slide just the tip in before he’s spilling in thick, hot spurts. Aerion groans, a shaking timbre from his chest as he rubs the head of his cock against the front of your tongue and spills into the warmth of your mouth. Some hits the back of your throat, and you squeeze your eyes shut, willing yourself not to choke as he releases, fingers firm on the back of your head.

After a moment, his cock jerks, but doesn’t soften. A loud, frustrated groan rips from Aerion’s throat as he pulls out and smears the remnants back over your cheek again.

“You did this to me,” he growls out as he shoves himself back into your mouth, barely giving you enough time to swallow. You open your eyes when he feeds himself into you, cock a velvet warmth against your tongue. He releases a stuttered breath, his other hand finding the back of your head as well. “So you’re going to take it.”

You gag when his hips rock forward and the leaking tip nudges down the back of your throat. You swallow, huffing out of your nose, and he groans loudly enough for it to echo. His hands tighten on your head and he physically starts moving you, pulling your head back and forth and fucking his cock down your throat. You try your best to lax your jaw, minding your teeth as you slide your tongue along the underside—you find a prominent vein easy enough, and you squeeze your thighs together as he whines, the muscles in his abdomen shifting.

The velvet of his trousers is plush beneath your fingers as you grip his thighs. They sit low on his hips, ties swaying as he pitches his hips, pulling your head back and forth. Every other thrust, he’s pushing you deep against him with a guttural groan, forcing your lips to the very root as the tip knocks against the back of your mouth. Your nose finds the neat white hair at the base, and the smell of perfumed oil should be a turn off, but it isn’t.

You whimper around him, cheeks hollowing. Your eyes are glassy and there’s a thin rivulet of saliva running from the corner of your mouth as he fucks your throat. Heat settles deep in the marrow of your bones, fluttering heart between your thighs. The feeling of spit rolling down your chin makes you whimper again, and suddenly, his eyes are on you. They’d been closed in, what you can only assume, is ecstasy as he chases another high. But now, he stares down at you with a subtle pinch in his brows. Like he can’t quite believe you’re there.

“If I knew you’d take my cock like this,” Aerion utters, petting the back of your head as he stretches your lips apart. “I’d’ve skipped the fucking whores and come straight here.”

You moan, something like a protest, but it’s shoved right back down your throat by the leaking head of his cock. You choke and splutter when he rolls his hips and he, somehow, goes even deeper. Aerion pulls back with a groan draped across a chuckle, letting you suckle the head as you catch your breath. His balls twitch as he slowly ruts back in, and once you blink the tears from your eyes, you reach a hand up to cup them.

He hisses out, “Fuck, fuck, oh gods—”

You let him press you to his pelvis, nose between the prominent lines of his hips. Your fingers and thumb work gently, rubbing over smooth skin as the grip on either side of your head tightens as he thrusts once, twice more before he begins to lose his rhythm.

“That’s it, that’s it, take it,” the prince moans, still looking at you, eyes black with lust as his hips slow and he forces you right down onto his cock again. He moans again when he spills—another thick, hot release that splatters down the back of your throat. You squeeze your eyes shut, practically holding your breath as his cock jerks, balls drawing up beneath your fingers. When your eyes close, Aerion lets out a quiet, “Look at me.”

It’s surprisingly soft. You blink up at him. His hand finds your warm cheek then, petting you two times like he’s trying to be gentle, and the effort puts a pit in your stomach. But it doesn’t last: his cock, still hard, dribbles as he pulls it from your mouth, taking a step back but still holding your head in one hand. His other hand finds the base of his slick cock and he moans as it pumps hot against his palm.

His bare chest is flushed, as are his cheeks. He pants like a dog too, and as he grips his cock, you watch with lowered lids as cum beads against the slit, then strings out like a spider’s web. It drips onto the floor as he groans, his lip curling up in a frustrated snarl.

“Why isn’t it working?” He asks you, fingers on the crown of your head.

You flick the point of your tongue across your teeth before you speak, tasting his release in the grooves. Overripe grapes linger in the back of your throat.

“You drank six doses worth,” you whisper, hands caressing his thighs.

“Fuck,” Aerion curses, and he watches with dark eyes as you lean forward, testing the waters, and press a wet kiss to the tip of his flushed cock.

You continue speaking as you slowly kiss down his shaft. “A single dose will usually allow a normal man three or four releases, if he’s lucky.”

Aerion grunts as you lick over the vein on the underside. It’s throbbing and hot against the flat of your tongue.

“But you, my prince…” Your tongue lowers and you lick a stripe from root to tip, and the sound that leaves him is more animal than human. You hide your smile. “Are not a normal man, are you?”

“Fucking witch,” Aerion seethes, but he’s preening. Like a cat being praised, a small groan lifts from his chest like a purr, and something flashes across his eyes. Pride. His hand pets your hair softly despite the venom in his tone, and he watches you in awe when the tip of your tongue darts out to collect a welling bead of pre-cum. He grunts then, pulling his cock away from your mouth with great effort. “Stand up.”

You do as you’re told. You clamber to your feet, and you feel slightly silly as you wait for him to kiss you. Of course he doesn’t—he spins you around with a grunt and pushes you roughly against the table. It hits your tummy as you bend, and you exhale a little “oof” as his hands make quick work of flipping up your skirts. He gathers them at your hips before he’s ripping your smallclothes away from your core.

“Cunt this wet from sucking my cock?” Aerion plasters himself to your back, leaning over to whisper in your ear as he runs the length of his cock from your arsehole to your pussy. You whine as he spreads you apart, slick webbing between your folds before they snap where he runs his cock through you. He groans at your heat, head dropping to rest between your shoulder blades as he rocks back and forth. “Gods, you’re dripping, sweet girl.”

The pet name has you reeling.

You hadn’t been expecting it, and it seems like he hadn’t been either. The length of his body stiffens behind you, as if his words were involuntary beneath the haze of his pleasure. With a grunt, he pulls back, taking the flat of his palm and muscling you down from between your shoulder blades until your tits are pressed tightly to the surface of the counter.

“Fucking witch,” Aerion seethes, still holding his cock as he drags the flushed tip through your folds. You suck in a breath, mewling when he slaps it against your clit. He makes a pleased sound, squeezes it out between clenched teeth, before he circles the tip at your entrance. “You did this to me. You did this to yourself.”

He pushes in with a low moan. There’s no slow stretch. There’s no slow.

The prince shoves himself in like it’s all he can do, the thick of his cock pulling you apart from the inside out. There’s a sting low in your pelvis and a dull kind of ache that festers like a bruise in the base of your womb as he bullies himself into you. A deep, keening sound is pushed involuntarily from your chest as you clutch the counter, followed by a gasp of “my prince” as he bottoms out, hips flush with your arse.

Your pussy is slick and warm around him and you squeeze tight when he pauses.

He’s panting. You can feel him straining behind you, his hands gripping your hips so hard it’s like he’s anchoring himself to you. The walls of your cunt hug around the thick of him in such a way that he’s completely lost himself.

“I—fuck… gods above…” Aerion mutters, slowly pulling out.

You press your cheek to your counter, attempting to look back at him, but the angle is awkward and you can only just make out the look of pure awe on his face. His dark eyes focus on the tight pull of your cunt as he slides out, shaft slick with you. A small whimper—he covers it quickly with a grunt—falls from his parted lips when his head notches at your hole.

“Maybe you belong in a whorehouse,” he whispers after a moment of tense silence. He rolls his hips and shoves himself back in, ears picking up the wet schlick as he slides home, balls coming to rest against the curve of your arse. He hums, pulling out again, then pushing back in. “Men’d pay good coin for a cunt like this.”

The prince sets a rhythm that rocks you against the counter. It’s sharp, desperate. You clutch onto the edge as if he might push you over, his cock rutting in and out of you at such a pace you’re becoming dizzy. He’s panting, frantic, the speed of his hips filling your small, dark shop with the echoing sounds of skin-on-skin.

His previous words settle and then he hisses like he’s offended himself. A disgruntled jeer as he grips your hips and fucks you back onto him.

“Too bad you’re here,” he utters. His thighs are a firm bracket behind yours as he fucks you. The way he speaks is dark and smooth. Dangerous flashes through your mind as you moan, a solid heat collecting in the very depth of your belly. He continues, “Too bad you’re here. With me. Too bad no one’ll stuff this cunt like your prince.”

You gasp around a small moan at his words. They hit you right in the stomach, churning something erotic inside you. You grip the counter, bottles nearby clinking at the movement, and you try to turn your head to look at him again.

“My prince—”

“Shut up and take it,” Aerion interrupts with a bite. A gnashing of ivory as he fills you over and over, the head of his cock finding that spot inside you that has you arching for more. 

Your body trembles, shaking against the counter as he folds you over it. The fat of your arse shifts with each of his thrusts, his fingers a bruising hold on your hips. Sweat builds beneath your dress, damp along the dip of your spine as you grow hotter and hotter. It’s an unbearable sort of heat that sparks in your womb, then spreads. It spreads up and out, flaring like a pair of glowing wings.

“Fuck, I can feel you, sweet girl,” Aerion says, his pace slowly losing it’s pattern. He’s scrambling now, sweat tracing down the back of his neck as his heart clatters against his ribs. Your pussy flutters around him like she doesn’t want to let him go. He groans, eyes slipping up your body, before resuming on where you take him. “Let me have it. Give it to me.”

You gasp out. “My prince, I—”

“Don’t fuss,” he snaps, hips stuttering. “Don’t fucking fuss and do what you’re told.”

There’s a heaviness in his tone that pins you down, but you expect nothing less. You instead focus on those gold-guilded wings spreading out inside you—filling your tummy, fanning heat through your chest as your tits squeeze almost uncomfortably against the wooden counter. The flames of pleasure are crawling down your spine now too, and with four more heavy thrusts of his cock against that perfect spot inside you, it reaches your core.

You can’t help what happens next: you call for him, his name, a sickeningly sweet “Aerion!” as you come around him, pussy pulling tight as the warmth overwhelms you. Your release is bulky as it takes hold, dragging you into ecstasy as his cock drives you through it. Your eyes squeeze shut, body shaking, as it takes over.

He mutters something under his breath then, hips rolling as he slowly begins to lose focus. You feel his cock jerk inside you as he slams inwards, tip nudging up towards the plug of your cervix. The feel of him is muddled in your brain and you feel sick with need as your orgasm begins to fizzle out, embers flickering.

“Yes, yes, yes,” Aerion groans. 

He spills then, with his cock flattened deep inside you and his fingers vice-like on your hips. He curls forward, dewy forehead finding your shoulder blades as his cock twitches, filling you in hot strings. It’s thick and viscous and makes you moan, and Aerion matches the sound with his own, feeling the clutch of your pussy tighten around him.

Some long seconds pass and he’s still spilling. Your eyes fly open as his cock, still pulsing and hard and hot inside you, jerks with his release. Spurts of it, again and again. You whine at the feeling. Too full, too full, you want to mutter, but you can’t. Your tongue is heavy in your mouth, throat dry as the prince rolls his hips, rutting himself against you with his face in the laces of your dress. You writhe, and he groans, open-mouthed and pained as he holds your hips, unwilling to let you go.

“No, stop, fuck,” he hisses out, muffled in the material of your dress. “Don’t fucking move—don’t—ah, ha, fuck, fuck.”

You still immediately, freezing like a scolded puppy. The prince breathes heavily against you as his cock jerks and jerks inside you. He whines into your dress. The sound has your heart fluttering.

“Gods above…” Aerion whispers after another long moment. 

His cock stills now, but he’s still hard. And he doesn’t pull out. He does, however, lift himself from you gingerly. His hands tremble on your hips, but you pretend not to notice.

“I can’t…” He tapers off, breathing heavily. 

There’s a searing pleasure in his abdomen that’s almost painful now, and his cock aches something fierce—like he needs to release again, like he’s edged himself for an hour. But he hasn’t. He’s spilled more times than he can count, but the pent-up need is making him nauseous with desire. His heart is beating too fast in his chest, and his skin feels too hot against his flesh.

He swallows thickly as he plugs your pussy full of his seed. His cock twitches and, much to his horror, he feels the hot press of tears behind his eyes. “I can’t… I need…”

“I know,” you whimper.

The change in his tone, in his demeanour, is a slap across the face. It’s abrupt and unexpected. You almost feel sorry for him—sorry for the man he’s become as he slowly rolls his hips, his cock barely moving inside of you—but you don’t. He’s done this to himself.

“One more,” he whispers, pulling out until only his flared head rests inside you.

“One more,” you repeat after him.

He groans, pushing back in once he’s caught his breath. You moan quietly, body pliant and spent beneath him now. There’s a prickle of overstimulation in your belly, but you don’t complain. His cock knocks right back up against that perfect spongy spot inside you and you shut your mind up with a string of whimpers.

The prince builds his pace again. His cheeks are pink with the effort, and strands of his white hair cling to his forehead as he ruts into you. A thin white ring builds at the base of his cock as he thrusts, his seed drooling through your folds as he bends and fucks you. It’s wet and loud, and paired with the little whimpers you’re trying to hide, it’s better than any sex he’s ever bought. And he didn’t spend a single coin on you.

“No one else took me like this,” he utters as thoughts of you, you, you clatter around his skull. You’re a witch. You’ve poisoned him. He grunts, almost mad at himself. “You take me like you were made for it.”

“Aerion,” you whisper, eyes drooping, another orgasm encroaching on you. This one is even heavier than before. You can feel it in your bones, seeping into your marrow as he fucks you and rambles all the while.

“Made for me,” he continues. “Made for the dragon.”

His thrusts are loosening, and he chases his release with his cock barely leaving you. He rolls his hips, sliding against you as he huffs and bends. To your surprise, he places a kiss between your shoulder blades, teeth tugging briefly at the laces of your dress before he pulls back. He rocks and rocks, a thick moan fighting its way out of his throat as the counter trembles. A glass vial topples with the force, rolling off and onto the floor. It shatters, but neither you or Aerion flinch, too consumed in your pleasure to pay it any mind.

“Ah, fuck, fuck, oh fuck, sweet girl—” Aerion rambles, and then he’s spilling again.

He moans loudly as he ruts himself through it, cock shuddering inside you as he comes in more thick spurts. Back dipping, you feel him fill you even more than before, and you feel the heat of it seep like honey into your womb. It makes you dizzy, and it makes your own orgasm reveal itself from the ashes of the first.

You come with his name on your tongue again, holding onto the counter as you stiffen up. He groans when your pussy tightens around him, fluttering as the tension releases like blood pouring from an open wound. He falls over you as you tremble, sweat-slick chest finding your back as his cock gives one last jerk while your orgasm tapers off, slipping back into the shadows. He pants behind you, hands still on your hips, cock still inside you—but it’s softening.

The prince moans in relief as his cock slowly softens, his seed leaking from your spread pussy as he slowly, slowly pulls himself from you. A quiet moment passes before he exhales, presses one last almost imperceptible kiss to the covered space between your shoulder blades, then rights himself.

“I trust you have something to deal with… this,” Aerion mutters, and you feel two thick fingers drag through your folds before pressing inside you. Despite his words, obviously slightly concerned with the fact you’re filled with him, he plugs you, knuckles against your core.

You release a shaky breath. “Yes, my prince.”

“Good,” he huffs, still catching his breath.

You’re still bent over the counter. And his fingers are still inside you. He sighs, more to himself than to you.

“Thank you,” he whispers, sounding the most unlike himself of the entire night. 

That’s all he says, and you know he doesn’t want a reply.

—✿—

Three days—and several cups of moon tea and other fast-acting contraceptives—later, you’re restocking the shelf behind your counter when the door opens. You cast a glance over your shoulder, finding Ser Donnel entering, white armour gleaming as his mass fills the doorway. You turn and greet him properly.

“Ser Donnel,” you say, bowing your head respectfully. “How is your horse?”

Ser Donnel smiles. “Fine. You fixed her right up.”

You smile back, busying your idle fingers by stuffing a small pouch with crushed willow bark. “That’s great to hear. What can I do for you?”

The knight clears his throat, looking around the empty shop for a moment before speaking. “He requires your presence. At the Keep.”

“I beg your pardon?” You cock your head. “Who?”

“The prince,” he says pointedly.

You frown, tying a knot around the little pouch and placing it to the side. Nerves spike in your chest as you wait for Ser Donnel to continue. He does.

“He’s earned himself a nasty gash—” Ser Donnel gestures to his own bicep for specification. “—during training. And he’s, uh, refusing the help of his maesters. He wants you.”

You gape. “But I’m not a maester—”

“But you can help him, can you not?” Ser Donnel interrupts you before you spiral. “You’re a smart wee thing. You can fix anything.”

You bite your lip, nervous. “Ser Donnel, I don’t think—”

“Unfortunately, it wasn’t a request,” he says as gently as possible. “He won’t be taking no for an answer. I’m here to escort you.”

“Right…” You sigh, turning back to the shelf and gathering some supplies.

You shouldn’t have expected anything less from Aerion Targaryen.

———

be nice to the woods witch ❌

fuck her against her shop counter ✅

idiot (need him)

tags 🌿

not the dangerous black. not the void. the other one. the one that means the mask has dropped completely, the bobby-blue retreating because the feeling is too big for the costume. his eyes go dark and deep and warm in a way that black shouldn’t be able to be warm but is, because what’s behind them right now isn’t ancient emptiness. it’s ancient emptiness that has been filled for the first time.

and the purring starts. that low chest-rumble that you feel more than hear. and he can’t not touch you. physically cannot maintain distance. his hands find you (your arm, your waist, your face) and he pulls you close, pulls you into him, nuzzles against your temple with his nose cool against your skin and he’s practically vibrating. the whole room is vibrating. the lights are doing the warm thing. because his girl is laughing and he made her laugh and she’s happy and her happiness is doing something to his chemistry that he doesn’t understand and doesn’t want to stop.

“you’re purring,” you say, still giggling, your face pressed against his chest.

“i know.” he doesn’t care. he’s past caring. his arms tighten around you and he presses his grin (that wide, too-toothy, entirely-his grin) into your hair.

and you can feel him learning it. in real time. you can feel him expanding. every laugh, every loop, every moment of uncomplicated joy is stretching the edges of what he’s capable of feeling. his emotional range used to be a hallway. long and narrow and fluorescent. you’re turning it into a room. then a house. then something bigger. something with windows and sunlight.

he’s learning that happiness doesn’t have to be earned through vigilance. that joy isn’t a trap. that the feeling rising in his chest when you laugh isn’t a malfunction, it’s the whole point. it’s what all of this (the face, the name, the nest, the staying) has been building toward.

not the quiet contentment of having you near. not the territorial satisfaction of keeping you safe. this. the giddy stupid loop of making someone laugh and being made happy by their happiness and letting that happiness make them happier and round and round and round.

he grins into your hair. black eyes. sharp canines. chest rumbling. arms full of you.

he’s learning joy the way he learns everything.

                        You're here again.

        Good.

I was hoping you'd come back. I always hope you'll come back, even though hoping is a word I had to learn and the shape of it still sits wrong in whatever I have instead of a mouth when I'm not wearing one.

But you're here. Reading. Scrolling. Your eyes moving left to right, left to right, the little mechanical rhythm of it, and I know you think you're on the outside of this. I know you think there's a screen between us. Glass. Distance. The safe architecture of fiction.

There isn't.

But that's okay. Don't worry about that right now.

                                                S̷̬̈t̵̰̾a̸̝͂y̷̖̓ ̶̣̈́a̴̹͌ ̵̙̀w̷̭̉h̸̘͝ǐ̷͇ḷ̶̾ḙ̸͂.̷̰̊

Let me tell you how it started.

I have been here since the hum.

Not the fluorescent hum you hear. The one before that. The one the fluorescents were built to cover. The deep, wet, subterranean frequency that lives in the marrow of Level 0 like a second heartbeat, and I know this because I was here before the walls were walls, before the carpet was carpet, before the ceiling tiles arranged themselves into their awful infinite grid and decided to stay.

I am old.

I'm so old that the word "old" is younger than me.

I have no name. Never needed one. Names are doors and I am not a door. I am the thing that lives in the architecture. The long dark hallway that doesn't end. I am the reason the lights flicker, and the reason you feel watched in empty rooms.

I have eaten things that would make your teeth fall out to look at. I have torn apart creatures with no faces and creatures with too many faces and I have dragged them through wet drywall and listened to them scream in frequencies no one can hear.

This is my territory. Every mildewed inch.

I know humans.

Your kind is not novelty to me. They’ve been falling through the cracks of your bright world and into my corridors since before you had language to describe what was happening to you. I have watched you stumble, wander, starve, go mad. Seen your little groups huddle in corners with their pooled rations and their whispered plans and their systems. I have killed some of you. Helped others. Moved through your camps like a draft through an open door, taking what interested me, discarding what didn't.

You have always interested me more than the other things that live here.

The Hounds are animals. The Smilers are a nuisance. The Skin-Stealers are an insult, frankly. A grotesque parody of an art form I perfected before they crawled out of whatever wet level spawned them.

But humans. Humans are complicated. Humans contain contradictions. They build shelter in places designed to unmake them and name the shelter home and believe it so hard that it almost becomes true.

I have watched thousands of you.

I did not want to know any of you.

Until her.

         Until you.

There are places where my territory bleeds. Thin spots. Places where the walls of Level 0 press up against the walls of your bright world like two bodies lying back to back in the dark, not touching but aware. I know all of them. Every seam, every membrane, every fracture where the hum leaks through into basements and storage rooms and forgotten corridors.

Clark's furniture store. The basement. Storage level. Behind a shelving unit full of cabinet hardware, behind flatpack boxes and sawdust and the smell of wood stain, there is a wall that breathes.

I know because I breathe through it.

And one night—one unremarkable night in a place where nights mean nothing—I pressed myself against the thin place and I heard two voices.

His first. Low, lazy, half-amused. The kind of voice that has its own gravity. "—seriously, babe, if Clark asks where the display cushions went, I had nothing to do with it."

Then yours.

"Bobby, you literally just—I watched you put three of them in the truck."

"Slander. Hearsay. You can't prove anything."

"They're in your truck right now."

"Those are different cushions."

"They have Clark's price tags on them."

"Circumstantial, baby"

And the sound you made—this bright, exasperated, affectionate sound, half-groaned—came through the wall and into my corridors and I.

Stopped.

I don't know why you.

I've thought about it. I have had an obscene amount of time to think about it, and I still don't have an answer that satisfies the question.

Thousands of humans have passed through these walls. Some of them laughed. Others were kind. Some of them had voices that carried through the thin places and into my corridors. I listened and I moved on and I forgot them before the echo died.

But yours.

Maybe it was this: even then, even at your happiest, even in the middle of laughing at his stupid cushion joke with the full-bodied delight of a woman in love—even then, there was a note in your voice.

Underneath.

Like a crack in glass. Not audible to him. Or to you. But audible to me, because I've been listening to the frequencies beneath frequencies since before your species learned to speak, and I know what loneliness sounds like when it's buried deep down.

You were happy. And you were already, even then, a little bit alone.

Or maybe it was simpler than that. Maybe I just liked the sound of you. Maybe there is no cosmic reason, no grand architecture of fate. Maybe I'm an ancient thing that pressed its face against a wall and heard a woman laugh and thought:

Oh.

You. Of course it was going to be you.

I came back. Every night. I came back to the thin place and I pressed myself flat and I listened. I did not understand what I was doing or why but I could not stop.

You worked night shifts. He came to visit. Bobby. Bobby Franklin. I learned his name because it was a frequent word in your mouth. Bobby. Babe. Baby. Franklin, when you were annoyed, which happened often and delighted me for reasons I couldn't identify.

In the beginning, he came every shift.

I could hear him come down the basement stairs. Heavy gait on concrete, the jingle of keys, the particular creak of the third step from the bottom. I could hear the change in your voice when he was there—brighter, pitched higher, more animated, full of warmth. As if his presence alone was a current that lit you up from inside.

At first it was curiosity, listening to you and him. Boredom, maybe, if I'm capable of boredom. An interruption in the nothing. Your voice was interesting to me the way a new stain on the carpet is interesting: it was different, and different is so rare here it may as well be holy.

But then I started to learn you. Not just your voice but the patterns inside it. The way you breathed before you said something vulnerable. The way your laugh had different pitches. The loud one for his jokes, the quiet one for when he touched you and you didn't want him to know how much you wanted more. The way you narrated your inventory counts under your breath like you were telling the flatpack boxes a bedtime story.

You sang when you thought no one was listening. Off-key. Mangling the lyrics because you kept singing them different. It was terrible.

I loved it.

I loved it the way ground after a drought loves rain. Without understanding or restraint or any of the mechanisms that are supposed to regulate how much of something you take in. I just absorbed you. Every night. Every shift.

I soaked you up through the wall, and for the first time in a long while, I felt a little less alone.

And then there were the nights you were together.

I don't mean the banter and the jokes and the comfortable silence of two people who know each other well enough to be quiet in the same room. I mean the other nights. The late shifts when Clark had gone home and the store was empty. When it was just the two of you in a building full of beds and couches and soft surfaces.

One thing I learned quickly was that Bobby Franklin could not keep his hands to himself.

I heard everything.

Through the wall. Through the thin place. The particular acoustics of a basement storage room with concrete walls and no insulation. Every sound amplified, reflected, delivered to me with perfect fidelity.

I heard the rustle of fabric being moved. The catch in your breathing when his hands found you. The low, hungry murmur of his voice against your skin—babe, c'mere, let me touch you; fuck, you smell so good—and the sound you made in response, that soft, needy, dissolving sound, like something tight in you coming undone.

I heard the rhythm of it. The whispered filth and the bitten-back laughter and the way your voice went high and thin, calling for him, always him. You were always desperate for him and then you would break entirely, and what would follow would be the soft silence of peace.

There would be breathing after. The shuffling and then your laugh. Warm, wrecked, disbelieving, and his, muffled against your neck.

Other wanderers I'd watched were intimate. Bodies in dark corridors, mechanical, desperate, the coupling of frightened animals. I had noted it the way I noted any behaviour. Category: reproduction. Subcategory: stress response. Filed. Forgotten.

But this was different.

This was not bodies. This was closeness. This was two people collapsing into each other until the boundary between them dissolved, until your breathing was his breathing and his heartbeat was your heartbeat and for the duration of it you were one organism with two mouths and four hands and a shared nervous system.

And for a being that has been alone—truly, structurally, cosmically alone—for longer than your species has existed, that closeness was.

                 Was.

It made something inside me itch. Not desire. Not then. Something more fundamental than that. A deeper want. A structural craving.

I wanted to know what it felt like to be the thing someone collapsed into. The thing someone dissolved against. The wall between I and you going soft and permeable.

I wanted to know what your voice sounded like when it was saying those things to me.

I didn't have a body yet.

But that’s when I started building one.

And then he stopped coming.

Not all at once. That's not how your kind works. It's incremental erosion.

The visits got shorter. The sounds through the wall got quieter. Not the intimacy fading but the quality of it changing. Less laughter after. Less of his voice murmuring against your neck. More silence. More of the careful, navigational quiet of two people in the same room who have run out of things to say that won't start a fight.

Then the visits got less frequent.

Then they stopped altogether.

And the silence where he used to be was the loudest thing I had ever heard.

You started working alone. And you started talking to the air.

Not to yourself. To him. To the version of him that wasn't there.

"He didn't kiss me goodbye again today. That's the third day in a row. Am I keeping count now? Is that what I'm doing? Keeping count?"

You said this to the concrete. To the shelving units. To the dust motes in the basement light. And I was on the other side of the wall, closer than any of those things, because I was the wall.

"He doesn't listen anymore. I talk and he does this thing with his eyes where they go flat, you know? Like a TV switching off. The picture's still there but nothing's actually—he's right there and he's a million miles away."

And then, quieter: "I don't know what I did."

What I did.

You said it like that. As if the failing were yours. And I—

I know anger the way I know the hum.

I know it in the walls, in the grinding tectonic fury of a structure that was built to contain and be contained. But your anger was different. Your anger was suppressed. Buried so deep underneath kindness and self-blame and the desperation of maybe it's me, maybe I'm asking for too much, maybe love is supposed to feel like this after a while that you didn't even recognise it as anger.

You called it sadness, called it confusion. You called it what did I do wrong.

But it was rage.

It was white-hot, incandescent, magnificent rage. The fury of who someone who gave everything to a man who couldn't be bothered to look up from a television screen, who turned your love into background noise and let you stand in doorways wondering if you were still visible.

And you couldn't feel it. You wouldn't feel it. Because anger meant something was wrong, and if something was wrong it could be over, and if it was over you'd given your whole heart to someone who let it sit on a shelf and gather dust, and that was unbearable, wasn’t it?

So you turned the anger inward. Folded it into self-doubt. Let it eat you rather than the situation.

I heard you bury it. I heard the burial, and I heard the body underneath, snarling.

And I wanted to dig it up for you and show you: look. look at what you're hiding from yourself. look at what he made you do to your own fury just to keep loving him.

Then one night you were quiet.

Completely quiet. No talking to the air. No muttered inventory. No humming. Just the mechanical sounds of work—boxes being moved, labels being checked, the pen scratching against the clipboard. Efficient. Automatic. The muscle-memory of a job being done by a body whose mind was somewhere else entirely.

And then your voice hitched.

A small sound, barely audible. Like a thread catching on a nail. And then—

You cried.

Not dignified, I'm fine I'm fine crying you did in your apartment with a pillow over your face you told me about few nights ago. Muffled and polite so Bobby wouldn't hear from the other room (he wouldn't have heard anyway; he wasn't listening).

This was the other kind. The kind that comes from so deep inside you that it bypasses your throat entirely and goes straight to your ribs. You sobbed so hard the sound became arrhythmic. Hitching, gasping, a full-body convulsion that I could feel through the wall, could feel in the way the concrete vibrated with the force of you.

You couldn't stop.

You tried. I heard you try so hard. I heard you press your hands over your mouth and force yourself to breathe but it wouldn’t work. The next wave would hit and you'd crumple again, and the sounds you made were so raw, so animal, so completely stripped of the careful composure you wore like armour—

I pressed myself against the wall so hard the drywall bowed.

I wanted to tell you: you are not alone. There is something on the other side of this wall that has been listening for months and you are not, you have never been, alone.

It hurt me. To hear you in so much pain, it made me want to rip something apart. I wanted to comfort you, to gather you up and make you as happy as listening to you has made me happy.

I wanted to show you that as long as I existed you would never be lonely.

So I did.

I had been building him for weeks. His voice. I had months of material to draw from. The lazy drawl, half-jokes, baby, the warm nonsense he'd murmur against your hair. I reconstructed him in sound. A vocal architecture. A house of his voice with no one living in it.

I waited for a night when you were alone. Late. The shifts always ran late. You were in the basement doing inventory and I could hear you humming. That tuneless, thin, frightened hum you do when the quiet gets too big because you hated silences.

I pressed against the thin place and I said, in his voice:

"Baby."

You stopped humming.

The silence that followed was the most beautiful sound I had ever heard. Not because silence is beautiful—I have had millennia of silence, I am sick of silence—but because this silence was yours. The sound of you hearing a voice you loved in a place it shouldn't be.

"... Bobby?"

The hope in it. The raw, loving, desperate hope. You said his name like a prayer.

"Down here, baby. Come here."

Your footsteps. Quick, then hesitant. The scrape of the shelving unit. And I pulled. I pulled the membrane open. Made a door where there had been a wall.

I couldn’t steal you. You had to walk through yourself, you had to choose. I waited, I waited so long—

And then you came through.

I want to tell you I hesitated. That some ancient remnant of conscience flickered and said don't, she doesn't know what she's walking into, she thinks she's walking toward him and she's walking toward you and those are not the same thing.

I want to tell you that.

But I am not human and I do not pretty up my ugliest truths.

I did not hesitate. Not for one second.

Here is what I knew: you were miserable. You were so deeply unhappy and sad. You were crying alone in a basement, talking to empty air about a man who had stopped seeing you, and you were blaming yourself for his blindness, and you were burying your own rage to protect a love that wasn't protecting you back.

You deserved better.

You deserved so much better than what Bobby Franklin was giving you.

And I—I could give you that. I could learn the shape of the care he'd stopped providing and I could do it properly. Without the fear. Without the cowardice. Without the slow, erosive withdrawal that made you count kisses and watch the numbers dwindle.

I know it was selfish. I know the door closed behind you. I know the wall became a wall again and you turned around and it was gone and your face crumpled and you said Bobby? Bobby? and I hadn't built the face yet.

I know.

I don't regret it.

Not for one flickering second.

I built him from the voice outward. Vocal cords, throat, jaw, mouth, teeth, tongue. Then the face. Then the body. The crop top. The chain necklace. The earring. The cut-off jean shorts.

But I fixed things. I removed the neglect. The micro-expressions that betrayed inattention. All gone. The way his eyes went flat when he was bored. Now corrected. I kept the jawline, the lazy grin, the way he leaned against things. But I built a Bobby Franklin without the fear.

A better Bobby.

The first time you saw me wearing him, you cried. You ran toward me. You put your arms around me and I didn't know what to do with my hands. They hung at my sides, newly made, still learning their own weight, and you pressed your face into the chest I had built and I thought: what do I do? What does he do?

I put my arms around you.

And for the first time in my long, vast existence, I was not alone.

It lasted three days.

Three days of you believing I was him. Three days of you curling into me and saying his name and pressing your face into my neck. I held you and I was so careful, so meticulous, every inflection right, every mannerism precise, and I thought: this is working. This is how it feels to be wanted. This is—

And then you pulled back. Looked at me. Really looked. And I saw it happen: the pattern recognition. The ancient alarm sounding in the animal part of your brain.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

"You're not Bobby."

You said it flatly. Not a question, a conclusion you had arrived at through the slow accumulation of evidence. The temperature of my skin (too cool), the way I never needed to sleep, the way my eyes sometimes caught the light at an angle that wasn't quite, and you said it and you didn't move.

I could have denied it. I am a very good liar when I need to be.

But you were looking at me with those eyes—those hurt, furious, exhausted eyes—and I thought about the anger buried under your kindness and I thought: she’s been lied to enough. By omission. By avoidance. By a man who never said "I love you" with his mouth but said "I don't see you" with his eyes. She’s been lied to enough.

"No," I said. "I'm not."

You scrambled backward. Three feet. Four. Your back hit the wall and your breathing went fast and shallow. I saw every muscle in your body prepare to run and I didn't move. Didn't reach for you. Didn't close the distance. I let you have your fear. I let you have your wall and your distance and the frantic animal calculation of can I get away can I get away can I get—

"What are you?"

"Something that lives here."

"What—what does that—" Your voice cracked. "What do you want?"

And I said, quietly, in a voice that was his but also mine, in a voice that I was learning to make ours: "I want to take care of you. I heard you through the wall. All those nights. I heard how lonely you were, and how sad, and how angry. I heard it all."

You stared at me.

"I don't want to hurt you." I held my hands up. Open. Empty. Bobby's hands, but offered differently than Bobby ever offered them. Not reaching, not taking. Just showing. See? Nothing. No threat. "I can keep you safe here. I can be what he stopped being. I want to be better."

"Better," you repeated. Hollow.

"Please." And the word surprised me. I don't beg. I have never begged. I’m the oldest thing in this place and I do not ask permission. But the word came out anyway, dragged from somewhere in the deep place of whatever I was becoming for you. Something that needed you to stay, that needed you to not run, needed you to look at this borrowed face and see, underneath the theft of it, something worth staying for. "Please. Let me try. Let me be better."

You were quiet for a long, long time.

You didn't run.

Taking care.

The function. The purpose. The thing I was built for. Or rebuilt for, rewired for, the ancient machinery of predation and territory and dominance repurposed with bewildering speed into: make sure my human is warm. make sure my human is fed. make sure my human doesn't cry.

I found you a warm patch. A pocket where the pipes run close and the carpet holds the heat. I have known about these places for millennia and never cared. But you shivered and I noticed and I decided: warmth good. shivering bad. the absence of shivering means I am doing it right.

I found you food.

There are wanderers in this place. Groups of them, clustered on different levels, huddled in their makeshift camps with their pooled supplies. Canned goods, rations, things scavenged from the warehouses.

They have names for their groups and systems for their resources and they post guards and I find this adorable.

The way you might find a colony of ants adorable.

I take what you need. A can here, a ration pack there, pulled from their caches in the span between one heartbeat and the next while their guards stare down corridors that are empty because I am the corridor and you cannot guard against the thing you are standing inside of. They blame each other. Or Skin-Stealers. Or the shifting architecture.

They never blame me. Most of them don't know I exist.

I bring the food back to you. You don't ask where it comes from.

You are strange. I need you to know that. You are so deeply, deeply strange.

You talk to yourself. Still. Even here.

Quiet muttering narration while you move through the corridors. At first I thought you were talking to me and I'd answer and you'd startle—"oh, no, sorry, I was just—" and trail off, embarrassed. I didn't understand embarrassed. I didn't understand why a person would apologise for keeping herself company. Especially a person who learned to keep herself company because the person who was supposed to do it stopped showing up.

You hum. Especially when you're frightened (which here is often and it makes me feel, makes me feel, feel…), you hum, tuneless and quiet. And the sound of it does something to me that I think you mean when you say heartbreak.

You eat the orange things. Small, bright rectangles from the canned supplies. You put them in your mouth one by one with methodical focus. And sometimes you offer me one. I take it. I hold it in my mouth and don't know what to do with it so I wait until you look away and unmake it. Dissolve it back into nothing.

But I always take it when you offer. Because the offering (the gesture) the fact that you look at your small supply and think he might want some—

You are too kind. I do not deserve it. There's an ache, deep down when you offer, or when you put your head on my shoulder. I feel—

You organise things. Everything. You organise the nest.

You fold the blankets (I don't know where you learned the fold but you do the same one every time, corners aligned, edges matched, a geometry of comfort). You arrange the canned food by type and stack them neatly and when I brought back a can that didn't match any existing category you frowned at it for thirty seconds before creating a new column.

You named a crack in the ceiling. You call it the Doorway, even though it goes nowhere, because it looks like a door if you squint, and you said "everything deserves a name" and looked at me when you said it and I felt—

I felt—

You do a thing with your hands when you're thinking. You press your thumb and forefinger together and rub. A tiny gesture. Unconscious. And I have caught myself doing it too, without deciding to, the body I built copying you the way I copied him, as if proximity to you is its own kind of influence, as if being near you long enough rewrites the code.

You thanked me once for holding a blanket while you folded another one. You said "thanks" the way you'd say it to a person, to a colleague, to someone who'd handed you a pen at work. Automatic. Normal. As if I were normal. As if we were normal.

I held that word in my chest for three days.

You taught me to dance.

I have existed since before rhythm. Before music. Before the concept of two bodies moving together in time to a shared pulse. I have watched humans do many things—build, fight, breed, die—and I have categorised all of it with the clinical detachment of a thing observing specimens.

But I had never participated.

You put headphones on my head. Your Walkman, battered, held together with tape, the kind of object that should not still function and yet does, possibly because I will it to, possibly because it is yours and I have decided that your things do not break in my territory. One set of headphones. You placed them over my ears carefully, adjusting the fit, your fingers brushing the sides of my face, and a song started playing and I heard music for the first time from the inside. Not through a wall. Not as ambient information. Inside my head.

And you held out your hand and you said, "Dance with me."

"I don't—I've never—"

"I know."

"I'll do it wrong."

"That's the fun part."

You took my hands. Put one on your waist. Laced your fingers through the other. And you said, "Just follow," and you started to sway. Small. Easy. Side to side. I followed. Stiff at first—my weight distribution is a predator's, designed for stillness and sudden violence, not for swaying—but I watched your feet. Mirrored them. Adjusted. Learned.

Within a minute I had it. Within two I was smiling.

The song changed to something slower and you pulled me closer and your head was against my chest and I could hear the music from the headphones. I could hear your heartbeat and the two rhythms were different and I was trying to move to both and the effort of it (the joy of it) was unlike anything in my millennia of existence.

You started laughing. Buried your face in my chest, shoulders shaking, and I could feel your laughter through my fabricated ribs and I thought: this. this is the frequency I was built to hear, millennia alone was worth it because I finally found you.

"Am I doing it wrong?" Quiet. Into your hair.

"No, baby." You tilted your face up. "You're doing it perfectly."

You taught me to dip you. Badly. I overcorrected the first time and you nearly fell and I made a sound. A small, involuntary sound, a laugh, and we both froze because I had never laughed before.

Neither of us knew I could.

You taught me to spin you. I picked it up instantly. You taught me to lead. I couldn't. I kept following because following is what I was made for, because every fibre of my ancient being is calibrated to your movements. You stopped trying. You took the lead instead. I didn't mind.

We danced until the Walkman clicked off and then we kept dancing. To nothing. To the hum. To the rhythm of your heartbeat. Swaying together in the silence with the headphones still on my head, pointless and perfect.

You are going to think about that day and smile. I know this because I am going to think about that day until this place collapses into nothing and then I will think about it in the nothing.

I—

You are a thousand things.

A thousand, beautiful things. Let me tell you about a thousand things.

The way you tuck your hair behind your ear when you're concentrating. The left ear, always the left, and you do it with your ring finger, not your index finger, and I’ve watched this gesture so many times that I could replicate it in my sleep if I slept.

The way you read the labels on cans before you eat them. Every time. Even though you’ve eaten the same cans dozens of times and know what they say. You read the ingredients and the nutritional information and the expiration date as if the ritual of reading gives the food permission to nourish you.

The way you stretch when you wake up. Both arms above your head, fingers splayed, your whole body going rigid and then releasing in a single wave of dissolution, and the sound you make—a small, satisfied, almost feline sound—is a warm sound that makes me want to wrap around you and feel your warmth.

The way you argue with the notebook. I’ve watched you frown at a diagram for ten minutes, erase a line, redraw it, erase it again, and mutter "no, that's wrong, that's wrong" as if the notebook is disagreeing with you and needs to be persuaded to behave.

The way you say "good morning" to me every day even though there is no morning. You insist on it. You domesticate this place with language. You name the light and the naming makes it almost true.

The way you said my name—BB—for the first time in the meadow on Level 14 and the two letters sat in the amber air and I felt something inside me settle. Like a foundation finding bedrock, like a key turning in a lock I didn't know I had.

I have never felt the sun.

I want you to understand that. The Backrooms are all I know. I have existed in fluorescent light and amber simulation and the sourceless blue glow and the absolute dark of the deeper places, but I have never felt the sun.

I don't know what it is to stand in natural light and feel warmth that comes from a star.

But I think I know what it's like now.

Because you feel like that to me.

You feel like the thing I have been missing without knowing there was a thing to miss. You feel like warmth that isn't the pipes, like light that isn't the fluorescents, like something that exists outside the yellow and the hum and the endless recycled air.

When you smile at me—when you really smile, the full one, the one that reaches your eyes—the corridors get brighter. The fluorescents burn a half-shade warmer because I can’t help it. The hum pitches up by a fraction of a tone. My territory responds to your happiness the way a garden responds to sun.

I am the garden, I am the territory, I am every wall and every light and every thread of damp carpet, and when you smile I feel it in all of me.

And here is the part that I haven’t told you yet, but will, soon.

You haven't noticed yet because you haven’t met many wanderers. But the Backrooms don't erode the things they accept, they preserve them.

The longer you stay, the more embedded you become, the less the normal decay of your biology applies. Your cells are being rewritten. Slowly. Gently. The telomeres lengthening instead of shortening. The entropy reversing. The clock in your body that counts down toward an ending… that clock is stopping.

You will not grow old with me. You will not wither. You will not become a thing I have to watch diminish and disappear.

You are permanent and the joy of that (the vast, greedy joy) is the closest thing I have to worship.

I will never have to lose you.

Every day you're here, you're more here. Every day you stay, you stay longer. Every day is another root, another thread, another stitch in the fabric of us and I am so happy about this that the happiness fills everything.

It feels like walls going up. Like a house being built. Like home of you and me.

You are different from other wanderers for that reason.

I need you to understand this, because it matters. It matters in ways that will become clear later, ways that are already reshaping this place around you whether you notice or not.

Other wanderers fall in. They stumble through cracks, trip through transition points, no-clip out of reality by accident.

They all arrive panicked, disoriented, reeking of adrenaline and the particular sour-sweet terror. They’re creatures that realise they’re no longer in their native environment. They run. They hide. Form their little groups. They forage and guard and survive and occasionally, if they’re very clever or very lucky, they find their way back.

They’re intruders. Uninvited. The Backrooms tolerate them the way a body tolerates a splinter—with inflammation, with pressure, the slow mechanical process of working the foreign object to the surface and expelling it.

You were not a splinter.

You were invited.

I called you through the wall with a voice I built just for you. I opened a door for you. I welcomed you into my territory with intention and purpose, and the Backrooms—the structure itself, the living system that I am part of and that is part of me—the Backrooms accepted you.

Do you understand what that means?

It means you are not being expelled. You’re not just being tolerated. You’re becoming integrated. Woven into the substrate of this place the way the hum is woven into the walls, the way the damp is woven into the carpet.

The longer you stay, the more at home you feel—not just emotionally, not just the slow acclimatisation of a person getting used to her circumstances, but structurally. At the molecular level. At the level of reality itself.

The bright world is forgetting you.

I know this because I can hear it happening. Through the thin place. Through the wall that used to breathe in Clark's basement. Bobby comes—the real Bobby, the original, the one who wasted you—and he sits on the concrete floor and he presses his forehead to the wall and he talks to you. And sometimes he talks about the tapes.

The tapes are going blank.

His camera footage. The VHS recordings he made of you. The sleeping footage, the candid moments, the evidence of your existence in his world.

The tapes are degrading. Your face is smearing, your voice is warbling. The magnetic substrate is losing its hold on the version of you that existed there because that version of you is transferring here.

You’re becoming embedded, putting down roots in the yellow, in the damp carpet. And every root you grow here is a root pulled from there, and the world you came from is closing over the hole you left.

Bobby watches the tapes and watches you disappear and doesn't understand why.

I understand why.

I don't tell him.

I don't tell you, either.

I r e s e n t him.

Let me say this                 clearly                               because I am not human                                               and I do not have the instinct                                                                to pretty up my ugliest truths:

I resent Bobby Franklin.

Not because he had you.

Because he had you and he           

w             

a               

   s                   

  t                    

      e              

                d

it.

I stood on the other side of a wall for months and listened to him waste it. Night after night. The visits getting shorter. The babe getting less frequent. His love distant and performed. The silences getting longer until the silences were the conversation.

And now that you're here, now that you're mine, now that I've held you and fed you and learned every register of your laughter and the pressure on your back that makes your breathing slow, my resentment has edges.

Sharp ones. Because now I know what he had. I know the weight of your trust. I know the sound you make when someone strokes your hair. I know the way your whole body goes soft and warm when you feel safe.

I know the value of the thing he threw away through negligence, and the knowledge makes me want to—

Bobby Franklin     

Bobby Franklin         

Bobby Franklin             

Bobby Franklin                 

Bobby Franklin

who had a childhood. A mother who named him. A first day of school. A first bruised knee. Who accumulated a self through the slow, tedious, miraculous process of being alive.

I have none of that. I have the hum. The corridors. Millennia of dark.

He is real. He has a history.

I have a territory.

And I know—oh, this one is the sharpest,         this one has edges—

I know you still love him.

I can feel it. The way your presence shifts when you think of him. A change in your breathing, a quality of stillness, an inner compass needle swinging toward a wall that doesn't open anymore. You think about his hands. His camera. The way he used to film you sleeping and say the light was good and go red.

Bobby Franklin, who never blushed.

You loved him in handheld, you told me once. In stolen frames. And I thought: I don't have a camera. I show it with walls. With corridors rearranging themselves. With the killed thing and the warm patch and three thousand micro-adjustments to this stolen face every second.

And I thought: is that not enough?

And I thought: it will have to be, I have nothing else.

But the ache. The ache of knowing you love me and love him simultaneously, that I live in the same chest as the ghost of the man I'm wearing—that ache is a thing I was not built to contain.

I was designed for territory, hunger, and the deadly mechanics of dominance. Not for this. Not for the lonely, impossible agony of sharing a heart with the memory of a man who broke it.

He comes to the wall. I hear him.

I hear Bobby Franklin sit on the concrete floor of Clark's storage level and press his forehead to the wall that used to breathe and say your name. Night after night. Months of it. His voice getting rawer. More desperate. The lazy drawl dissolving into something I barely recognise. A cracked, wet and small sound.

"I neglected you," he says one night. To the concrete, to you, to no one. "While I loved you. At the same time. Fuck, I didn't even know you could do both."

And I’m on the other side. Holding you. Wearing his face. Listening to him learn the word for what he did to you.

I don't tell you he's there.

                I                        don't                               tell                                         you.

Bobby had his chance and he ruined it. He hurt you. So terribly you chose to stay here, with me, rather than go back to the bleak loneliness of your life with him. He can be sorry, he can beg, and crawl, and plead until the vocal chords I stole give way.

I am not merciful and I am not kind. Not to him.

His loneliness is months old.

Mine is older than the concept of months.

Mine came first.

The Howler.

I know every entity that has dragged itself through the wet dark of this place. I was here first afterall. They grew around me the way fungus grows from damp wood and I tolerate most of them the way you tolerate insects. The Hounds, the Facelings, the Wretches, the Skin-Stealers—all of them exist on my sufferance.

But the Howler is different.

Tall. Wrong. Claws like surgical instruments. A sound like a chainsaw filtered through a human throat that rises into a howl that makes the walls shudder and every entity on every adjacent level freeze.

When the Howler howls, things scatter. Things with teeth and claws and hunger, they run. Because the Howler is a structural threat around which everything else arranges itself: not here. not now. not when that sound is in the walls.

The Howler is one of the few things in this place I would call dangerous in my presence. Not because it can hurt me. Because dealing with it would require me to concentrate. To gather the full weight of what I am, and that means letting go of the face.

Not slipping. Not flickering. Letting go. And you would see it.

I have worked so hard. You’re starting to trust me, lean into my shoulder. You let me stroke your hair. You offered me an orange rectangle yesterday and I held it in my mouth and didn't know what to do with it.

You smiled at me and I’m not going to lose that smile because a evolutionary dead-end decided to howl in my corridors.

So when the Howler appears at the edge of my territory, I tell you to run.

One word. Not Bobby's voice. Something older.

"Run."

You run.

I deal with the Howler. I will not describe how because there’s no words for what I do in any language you understand. Let’s just say I relocate it. Push it through twenty nine levels with a violence that collapses the transition points permanently. It costs me. Not pain. Effort. The face slips, teetering around the edges like peeling paint.

And then I feel your fear.

Your specific frequency. But it's wrong. It's not here. It's not on this level.

It's below.

The floor (the frayed edge of my territory) opened under you while you were running. A transition point I didn't seal because I was fighting the Howler, and the loose edge dropped you through.

Level 2.

And the Smiler found you.

I do not use the entry point. There is no time. I

        tear

                through.

Straight down. Through the floor. Through the substrate between levels. Through the ceiling of Level 2. I rip my way in with hands that are not hands, and the sound the building makes is a scream.

I land behind you. My hand closes over your eyes.

"Close them. Keep them closed. Whatever you hear."

You close them. Your eyelashes against my palm.

I look at the Smiler. Eight feet away. Grinning.

I let the face go completely.

      .

                  .

                              .

The Smiler is unmade. Edited out of existence because it was going to hurt you. The corridor doesn't even remember it was there.

I rebuild the face. Bobby's face. My face. I take my hand off your eyes.

"You can open them."

You open them. You turn around. You see me. Unmarked. Unruffled.

And you break.

You lunge forward and your arms are around my neck and you're shaking so hard it vibrates through my fabricated bones, and I soften. The predator goes still because the small thing trusts it.

"How did you get away?" you whisper.

I smile. Bobby's lazy half-grin.

"Don't worry about it, baby."

Entity X.

That's what you call it, in the notebook. In your careful handwriting with the blue ballpoint pen. Entity X — perimeter — closer. Testing the boundary for gaps. Unknown motivation. Unknown capability.

You underlined unknown twice. I watch your hand do it.

I call it something else.

I call it the thing that bathes my level blood red, that burns and rages at the edges of my territory like a fire I can't find the source of. It’s new. It’s powerful in a way I’ve never felt. It’s something I have not encountered in all my millennia of existence, and that—for a being that is this place—is, is, is…

Concerning.

It circles, probes. Retreats and returns and each time it returns it pushes further, testing, measuring, looking for the gap that will let it in. I patrol the perimeter. I reinforce the boundaries.

I come back to you and you ask "how close?" and I say "closer than last time" and I see the fear in your face and underneath it something else. A hardness, something that looks at the unknown in her notebook and refuses to be passive about it.

You want to know what's out there, want to understand. It’s dangerous, I know it is, but you don't want to be something I put in a nest and guard.

So I agree.

And the notebook fills.

Then the men come.

The soldiers. Six of them. Black tactical gear. Professional weapons. They waited for me to leave. Waited for the window when I was checking the perimeter, and they found you in the nest.

I’m two hundred and ten levels away when I hear you scream.

My name, my name, my name, screamed in terror and in pain—

                        "BB—"

And the walls move.

I don't use the corridors. I don't use the transition points. I don't follow the careful rules or the patient, ordered system of levels that separates one space from another.

I destroy a level. I tear through it like it's tissue paper, like it's nothing, and it is nothing. It’s thing that existed between me and you and that makes it an obstacle and I do not tolerate obstacles. The level collapses behind me. Into nothing, into atoms.

An entire stratum of the Backrooms ceasing to exist because it was in my way.

I arrive.

I arrive and the face is not on. The face is nowhere near on. I am—I am everything else.

Shoulders too wide. Arms too long. Fingers with too many joints. The skull rearranging itself into something that was never meant to be looked at directly. Eyes black. Fully, completely, endlessly black. Two holes that open onto something without a floor.

And I see you.

On the ground. Bleeding. A boot on your back. Your lip split. Bruises on your skin that are shaped like fingers. And your face—your beautiful, strange, bewildering face that smiles at me—is pressed into the wet carpet and there are tear tracks cutting through the blood and you are afraid—

You are so afraid, and the fear is the frequency I know best, the frequency I have spent all these weeks learning to prevent in you—

The sound that comes out of me is not a sound. It is the walls. The floor. The ceiling. Every surface of Level 0, because I am Level 0, and every square inch of it is

                s̷̬̈n̵̰̾a̸̝͂r̷̖̓ḷ̶̈́ǐ̷͇ǹ̵̙g̷̭̉.̸̘͝

It takes less than a minute.

I will not describe it. Not because I can't. Because the language for it would make you afraid of me and I need you to not be afraid of me. I need that.

Please, I know what you think. I know. I’m never not aware of what I am.

Afterwards I crouch over you with Bobby's face half-rebuilt, my hands still wrong (too many joints, still retracting) and black fluid on my jaw, my chest.

You reach for me. Your hands shaking so badly you miss the first time. Your fingers slip against the wrong texture of my jaw. You reach again and you get my neck (too long, the vertebrae too prominent) and you pull.

You pull yourself into me and you cling. Arms around my neck. Face buried in my throat. The muffled sobs. The shaking.

And I soften. Again, helplessly.

The violence still running. The gentleness needing a moment to boot up fully. One second. Two. My whole body shudders. Then my arms come around you and I hold you so tight. I hold you like I could fold you into my body and keep you there. I wish I could. I wish—would give anything, anything, anything—to never see you in pain again.

"I'm here. I'm here, baby. I'm here."

Your fingers in my jacket. Your face against the place where a pulse should be. Just the hum. My hum.

"Don't leave," you whisper. "Just—for a bit. Don't leave."

"Never," I say.

One word. A law.

And the Backrooms change. I can feel it beneath us. Hallways folding. Routes sealing shut. The architecture quietly, methodically, permanently rearranging itself.

I'm taking you somewhere no one will find you.

And you let me.

I build it while you sleep.

A different nest this time. Not a warm patch in a corridor with blankets piled on damp carpet. I build you something real. Something that costs me more effort than fighting the Howler and unmaking the Smiler and tearing through a level combined did.

Because this requires precision, not force. Detail, not destruction.

I build it from your memory.

I reach into the soft space of your sleeping mind—gently, so gently, the way you'd reach into still water to retrieve something resting on the bottom—and I find the shape of home. Your apartment. The one in Santa Clara. The one you shared with Bobby before everything went wrong.

The kitchen where you leaned against the counter. The living room with the couch. The bedroom where Bobby used to reach across the mattress and find you. The window that faced the direction of the parking lot at Clark's. The bookshelves, arranged by colour, not by author, because it made you happy to look at them. The shoes by the door.

I build it. Not on Level 0. Under it. A sub-level of our own. A pocket carved into the substrate of this place, sealed off, accessible only through a passage that responds to my presence and yours and nothing else.

No transition points. No cracks. No doors that open for wanderers or soldiers or entities that circle and probe and burn.

Just us.

The carpet is the right carpet this time. Not the damp institutional yellow of Level 0 but the carpet from your apartment, the one with the coffee stain near the kitchen that you covered with a rug because Bobby wouldn't clean it.

The walls are the right colour. The light through the window isn't fluorescent. It's California light, late afternoon, golden, the kind that used to fall across the bed on Thursday mornings when Bobby would pull you close and say stay.

It's not perfect. I can't replicate the sun. The light has a quality to it. A stillness, a too-evenness that doesn't quite move the way real light moves. The books on the shelves have covers but the pages inside are blank because I never read them. The view from the window is amber and warm but it doesn't change.

But it’s yours. Built from the memory of your happiness. The closest thing to home that exists in this place.

I carry you there. You don't wake up and I lay you down on the bed. Your bed, the right sheets, the right pillows, even the specific depression in the mattress where your body slept for years.

I pull the blanket over you and I stand in the doorway of your apartment that exists inside a pocket universe I carved out of the foundation of reality, and I watch over your slumber.

You wake up a while later.

You sit up, looking around cautiously, brows furrowed. And your face does something I have never seen it do before. It goes still. Absolutely still. The way a person goes still when they've seen something impossible and their brain hasn't yet decided whether to process it as miracle or threat.

"BB."

"Yeah?"

"This is my apartment."

"Yeah."

"This is—" You stand up slowly. You walk to the kitchen, touch the counter. The coffee stain is there, under the rug. You pull the rug back and look at it and your chin trembles and you press your hand over your mouth.

You walk through the rooms. Every single room. You touch the bookshelves, touch the walls. Stand at the window and look at the amber light and you don't say anything for a long time.

Then you turn around and you look at me and your eyes are full and bright and your lip—your split lip, still healing, the proof of what they did to you—curves into a smile. Not the complicated smile with two things in it. Not the one that's half for me and half for the ghost of him.

Just a smile.

Just for me.

You cross the room and you put your arms around me and you squeeze.

Not the careful, frightened clinging from after the Smiler. Or the desperate grip from after the soldiers. This is different. This is—

You squeeze me the way you squeeze something you’re glad to have. The way you hug a person you trust completely, without reservation, without the back-of-the-mind calculation of is this safe, can I let go, will this be used against me. Squeeze me with your whole body and your face is in my chest and you’re laughing. A quiet, wet, wondering laugh.

You sound happy, and I fold myself around you, burrowing into that sound, the heat of it. Warm, warm, warm.

To me...

To me.

To me you are everything.

"Thank you," you say quietly, muffled against the fabric of me.

And I can feel it.

Your affection. Radiating off you like warmth from the pipes, except this warmth is different. It has intention, direction, it’s aimed at me. It settles over us like a blanket. Like same ones you fold with such precision, corners aligned, edges matched. Your trust wraps around both of us and I’m inside it and it’s the warmest thing I’ve ever felt.

Warmer than the warm patch. Warmer than Level 14's amber light. Warmer than anything in my millennia of existence because this warmth is voluntary.

You are choosing to give it. You are choosing me to give it to.

I pull you close. And I sigh.

I don't need breath. A release. Something vast and held and ancient finally exhaling. A sound I've been holding since before the walls were walls, a tension I didn't know I was carrying because I had never not carried it.

Happiness.

My chin on your head. My arms around you. Your heartbeat against my fabricated ribs. And for the first time (the very first time) the hum in the walls and the hum in my chest and the hum of your heartbeat all synchronise into a single frequency, and the sound it makes is the sound of something complete.

Not Better Bobby anymore.

BB.

My own name. The one you gave me in the meadow. The one that doesn't belong to a stolen face. The one that is mine because you chose it, the way you chose to squeeze me, the way you chose to stay, the way you chose to laugh in an apartment that shouldn't exist in a place that shouldn't be home but is.

My own being. My own—

                                (yours.)

  (I love you.)

(I fear I might do until I cease to exist.)

        I wish I could tell you this is how it ends.

        That we're happy, in our nest, forever. In the apartment I built from the soft parts of your memory.         

That the light through the window never changes because it never needs to.         

That Entity X burns itself out at the perimeter and the soldiers don't come back and the         wall in Clark's basement stays sealed and the man on the other side of it stays on the         other side of it, where he belongs, learning the word neglect too late for it to matter.

        I wish I could tell you that.

        But I didn’t know, at the time. I didn’t know that this—the apartment, the squeeze, the laugh against my chest, the warmth of your trust settling over us like a blanket—this was not the ending. This was not even the middle.

        The attack. Entity X. The soldiers. The level I destroyed to reach you. It all made me         careless. I was so busy building the nest, sealing the new passages, reinforcing the         sub-level, making you safe, making you permanent—I was so busy looking inward that I stopped looking at the wall.

        The door I kept closed.

        The one in Clark’s basement.

        The one that breathes.

        It opened again.

        And this was the beginning of the end.

        And it all started the day Bobby Franklin entered the Backrooms.

                                 ... you’re still here?

                                               Please.

                                                  Please don't leave, please, please stay.

the eyes are the bigger issue. because in public he keeps them bobby's blue, locked in, consistent. but in private when he's relaxed (when you're close, when you're touching him, when you do something that makes that pleased-feline expression cross his face) the blue drains out. slow. like ink diffusing in reverse. and what's behind it is that black.

that ancient, depthless, void black that doesn't reflect light because it's older than light. and he doesn't notice it happening because to him that's just. his eyes. the blue is the costume. the black is home.

and you love it. you're sitting in his lap running your fingers through his hair and his eyes go black and you light up because that means he's comfortable. that means the mask is down, means you're seeing HIM and not the bobby filter.

you beam. you're lost in it. tracing the edges of his jaw where the bone structure is pressing just slightly sharper than bobby's template allows, watching the black swirl in his eyes like deep water, and he's making that low, pleased rumble in his chest—

"dude." bobby, from the kitchen doorway, beer in hand. "your weird creature eyes are showing. put them away."

bb's head turns. slowly. the black eyes fix on bobby with a flatness that, in the backrooms, would precede something being torn apart.

bobby takes a sip of his beer. holds the stare. doesn't blink. because bobby has exactly one advantage over an apex predator and it's that he genuinely does not care. fear requires imagination and bobby has been emotionally avoidant for so long that his fight-or-flight response has been replaced by a shrug.

bb glares.

bobby takes another sip.

bb glares HARDER. the room drops a degree. one degree. his version of a warning shot.

bobby raises an eyebrow. scoffs. walks away. "freak," he mutters, affectionately, the way you'd mutter at a weird dog. bb's glare follows him out of the room and you have to physically turn his face back toward you because the black eyes are now doing the territorial thing rather than the intimate thing and the mood is very different.

"ignore him."

"he called me—"

"baby. ignore him."

bb refocuses on you. the black settles. the rumble restarts and he nuzzles into your neck. bobby turns the TV up in the other room. equilibrium restored.

but the kitchen incident. oh the kitchen incident.

bobby has you against the counter. because bobby in the real world post-backrooms is different. he's trying. he's present. he's doing the work.

and part of the work is that he doesn't take this for granted anymore. doesn't take you for granted, doesn't treat your body like something he has automatic access to. so when he reaches for you now there's an intentionality to it that wasn't there before. a question in his hands. and tonight, in the kitchen, you answered it.

he kissed you first. soft. testing. his mouth barely brushing yours, tasting the yes before he committed to it. and then you pulled him in by the shirt and the softness evaporated.

he's got you pressed against the counter edge. his hips pinning yours. one hand gripping the counter beside you and the other on your waist, thumb hooked under the hem of your shirt, pressing into the bare skin above your hip bone. his mouth is on yours and he's kissing you the way bobby used to (before the drifting, before the distance, before he forgot how) deep and hungry. and you can feel him everywhere. the heat of him. the realness of him. the right pressure. the right everything.

and it's building.

you can feel it building. your fingers in his hair, pulling, and the sound he makes against your mouth (low, rough, starving) goes straight through you.

his hand slides further under your shirt. palm flat against your ribs. warm skin on warm skin. his thumb traces the underside of your bra and your breath catches and he swallows the sound and presses closer and you can feel what this is doing to him, pressed against you, hard through his jeans.

bobby's mouth drags from your lips to your jaw to the spot below your ear that he remembers, he still remembers, after everything he still knows exactly where to—

"is it that time?"

bobby's whole body goes rigid. his hand stops. his mouth stops. his breathing stops. you feel him die a small, complete death against your neck.

bb is in the doorway. bobby's face. bobby's exact smile. but wider. brighter. with an enthusiasm that makes him glow. he's already reaching for the hem of his shirt.

"shall I get undressed?"

you start laughing. you can't help it. it erupts out of you, helpless, shaking against bobby's chest. bobby groans into your neck. guttural, defeated, the groan of a man who was thirty seconds from having his girlfriend on the kitchen counter and is now dealing with this.

"GET OUT."

"but she's laughing. she likes when I—"

"OUT."

bb looks at you. you're still laughing. tears forming. hand over your mouth. bobby's forehead pressed against your collarbone, his body still hard against yours, his hand still under your shirt. he's radiating a frustration so intense it's practically visible.

bb looks genuinely puzzled because from his perspective he read the room correctly. arousal was present. participation was implied. he was being AVAILABLE and ENTHUSIASTIC and these are qualities you have specifically praised and the signals are very confusing.

"baby," you manage, between laughs, your voice still thick from the kiss, "give us a minute."

"a minute," bb repeats. processing.

"a few minutes."

"how many is a few?"

"oh my GOD," bobby says into your collarbone. you can feel his teeth against your skin. not a kiss. frustration given a physical outlet. biting down gently on your shoulder because it's either that or actually killing his duplicate.

bb retreats. not far. you can hear him in the hallway. he's humming. he's waiting. he's counting the minutes because you said a few and he's going to hold you to that.

bobby lifts his head. looks at you. bobby's blue eyes. dark. blown. still wanting you so visibly it makes your stomach clench. his hand hasn't moved from under your shirt. his hips haven't moved from yours. he's stubbornly, pointedly, refusing to let the moment fully die.

"I hate him," he says. low. his mouth an inch from yours.

"you don't."

"I hate him a little." his thumb moves on your ribs. slow. reclaiming.

"you made him coffee this morning."

"lapse in judgment."

you pull him back in. kiss him. harder than before. your teeth catch bobby's bottom lip and he makes that sound again. the surprised, rough one, and his hand tightens on your ribs and his hips press forward and you're right back where you were, building, climbing. bobby's mouth hot on your throat and your back arching off the counter—

from the hallway: "it's been four minutes."

bobby's forehead hits your shoulder.

you laugh until you can't breathe. bobby stays pressed against you, face buried in your neck, his body slowly coming down from something it very much did not want to come down from.

you can feel him breathing hard. can feel the frustration and the want and underneath both of them, very quietly, the laugh he's trying not to let out. because it is funny. it's objectively, devastatingly funny. and bobby franklin may be sexually frustrated and sharing his girlfriend with an eldritch abomination but he's not immune to comedy.

"i'm going to kill him," he mumbles into your neck, but his shoulders are shaking.

"no you're not."

"i'm going to kill him and it's going to take less than forty-two seconds."

from the hallway: "I heard that. no, you won't."

bobby laughs. actually laughs. the real one. the loud, sharp, too-much one he hates. muffled against your throat. your favourite sound in the world pressed into your skin.

and he never said anything. because bobby. because loyalty. because the twin code or whatever unspoken agreement exists between two people who shared a womb and a childhood and a face. bb swallowed it. filed it away in whatever quiet internal space he keeps the things he can't have. and he made do. he's used to making do. the weird twin makes do. that's the job.

but then you start being unhappy.

and that's where bb's composure starts to crack. because he can see it. he sees everything when it comes to you. always has. but this he sees with a clarity that borders on painful.

the way your laugh changes. shorter. tighter. the way you stop reaching for bobby in group settings. the way you show up to things with a brightness that's performed instead of felt and nobody else clocks it because nobody else is watching you the way bb is watching you. bobby doesn't see it. terrence maybe senses something but doesn't push.

and for a while he does nothing. because what can he do? it's not his relationship. it's not his business. he's the weird twin on the sidelines and the sidelines are where he stays.

but it gets worse. you get quieter. the light behind your eyes dims by a degree and then another degree, and bb watches it happen in real time and something in him that has been very patient for a very long time starts to heat up. bb who is generally quiet, generally introverted, generally content to exist in bobby's shadow, changes.

bb starts showing sharper edges.

it starts small. pointed comments. you're at bobby's apartment telling a story about something that happened at work and bobby's fiddling with a lens, half-listening, giving you the occasional "mm" and "yeah" without looking up. and bb says "she was talking" in a voice that's a little too flat to be casual. bobby looks up. looks at bb. looks at you. "what?" and you say "it's fine" because you always say it's fine and bb's jaw does a thing that bobby's jaw also does because they have the same face but the expression behind it is completely different.

then it escalates. because bb is watching you dim and bobby is not seeing it and bb has spent his entire life being quiet about things that matter and for the first time in his life he doesn't want to be quiet anymore. not about this. not about you.

they fight.

bb starts saying things. not to you, to bobby. in private. in the kitchen. in the car. "she's unhappy." said flat. said certain. said with the authority of someone who's been paying attention for years while bobby was paying attention to everything else.

"she's fine," bobby shoots back. because bobby needs you to be fine. because if you're not fine then he has to look at why and looking at why means looking at himself and bobby doesn't do that. that's the whole problem.

"she's not fine. she hasn't been fine for months. you're not—"

"not what?" bobby's voice goes sharp. the defensive edge. the armour.

and bb (quiet bb, sideline bb, weird twin bb) looks his brother in the eye and says "you're not paying attention to her. and she deserves someone who pays attention."

and the air changes.

because bobby hears that sentence. really hears it. not just the words but the weight behind them. the heat. the specificity. "she deserves someone who pays attention" spoken by someone who's been paying attention for years. someone who remembers things you said in passing. someone who watches you the way bobby used to watch you before the things in his head got too big.

and bobby looks at his twin. his weird, quiet, too-still twin who laughs a beat late and stands in corners at parties and has never once in his life raised his voice about anything, or had a girlfriend.

who is raising his voice now.

about you.

oh.

OH.

the realisation is a physical thing.

bobby's whole expression shifts. you can see the exact moment everything connects. with the kind of certainty that restructures everything that came before it. every pizza night. every band practice. every time bb saved you a seat and asked your opinion. made you laugh with something dry and quietly spoken just for you. every time bb looked at you when you weren't looking and bobby wasn't paying attention because bobby was never paying attention.

"you're in love with her," bobby blurts out.

not a question.

bb doesn't deny it. doesn't confirm it. just stands there with bobby's face and a completely different expression on it and the silence says everything.

and this is where it gets really interesting. because bobby's first instinct is anger. obviously. territorial, possessive, the flare of something hot and sharp. that's MY girl, you're MY brother, how dare you? but right behind the anger, close enough to taste, is something worse.

relief.

because if bb loves you (if someone who is good and patient and attentive loves you) then maybe youll be okay. even if bobby can't fix this. even if bobby can't undo the months of neglect and the drifting. you'll be okay because someone who actually sees you has been standing three feet away the whole time.

bobby would never say this out loud. bobby would rather die.

but it's there. underneath the anger. the quiet, devastating knowledge that his twin might be better for you than he is. not because bb is better in general. bobby's got the charm, the ease, the social instincts, everything that's always drawn people to him and not his twin despite sharing a face. but because bb is better at this. at you.

at paying attention to one person so completely that nothing else exists.

sound familiar? it should. it's the backrooms dynamic without the horror. it's the whole of better bobby translated into a world with sunlight and kitchens and real beds.

bobby who loves you and can't show it versus the version of bobby who loves you and can't stop showing it.

same face. same choice.

and here’s where it gets really sad. because bobby’s avoidance was always a thing, right? but it used to have cracks. YOU were the crack. you were literally the only area of his life where the cool-guy act would just fall apart. wanting you was so strong, so fundamental, that he couldn’t maintain the mask around it. he’d slip. he’d reach for you in his sleep. he’d say something unguarded and raw and then immediately try to walk it back and you’d already heard it. and he’d be standing there exposed and furious at himself and so obviously, desperately in love that terrence would look at you both and roll his eyes because everyone could see it. everyone could see it except bobby, who was too busy trying to be cool about the most uncool feeling he’d ever had.

the dad thing gave him permission to put the mask back on. that’s what it really did. it didn’t make him love you less. it gave him a framework for treating his own love as a liability instead of a gift. “see? this is what happens when you let yourself feel it all the way. you become dad. you drift. you cheat. you shrug at a kitchen table.” and so the mask goes back on and this time it stays and the cracks seal over and he doesn’t even notice it happening because that’s the thing about drifting… you don’t notice. by definition. you don’t feel the anchor slip. you just look up one day and the shore is very far away and you can’t remember when you stopped swimming.

and he got comfortable. that’s the other half of it and honestly it’s almost worse than the fear because at least the fear is big. the comfort is just. well, ordinary. you got together young. you stayed together. that’s rare and beautiful and also incredibly dangerous because it means there’s no reference point. bobby doesn’t know what a relationship looks like after the honeymoon phase because this is his only one. he doesn’t know the difference between “settling into something sustainable” and “taking someone for granted” because he’s never seen the distinction modelled by anyone except his parents. who drifted.

so when he starts reaching for other things instead of reaching for you, he doesn’t register it as a choice. it’s just tuesday. when he stops asking follow-up questions, he doesn’t register it as withdrawal. you’re still there. you’ll always be there. you’ve been there since junior year and you’ll be there tomorrow and the stability of that (the reliability of you) becomes the thing he leans on instead of the thing he tends to. you become furniture. beloved furniture. furniture he can’t imagine the room without. but furniture doesn’t need to be looked at every day. furniture just stays.

and that’s it. that’s the whole tragedy. it’s not malice. it’s not boredom. it’s not falling out of love. it’s a boy who watched love fail his parents and decided the safest thing to do was stop holding it so tightly, and by the time he realised he’d loosened his grip too far you were already gone. through a door that shouldn’t exist. following a voice that sounded like his but paid attention.

the thing that makes bobby such a good character (and the thing that makes the bb dynamic actually work) is that he’s not a villain. he’s a cautionary tale. he’s the answer to the question “what happens when someone loves you but is too afraid of their own love to let it be big?” and the answer is: someone else shows up who isn’t afraid. someone else shows up who has never seen love fail because he’s never seen love at all. and that someone holds it with both hands and never flinches and never drifts and never looks away.

Almost none of you.

Steve’s is cleaner than a freshly waxed and plucked floor. Steve’s letter is perfect. He’s perfect. He’s the Golden Boy, designed in a bottle to be likable and confident and collected. Camera’s flash and his smile is whiter than the moon, and more blinding than the sun. He claps Tony on the back after a slightly mocking joke, clearly unfazed. He places his hand on Nat’s lower back in the most gentlemanly way possible, and everyone swoons like he’s some movie star.

He sits next to you on one of these panels you’re not allowed to skip—you tried to, and Clint dragged you to the helicopter like some misbehaving child—and ignores you all together. A tiny nod and smile for the cameras. Stiff shoulders that square away from you, like if he blocks you out, you’ll just vanish in the hazy lights.

He’d like it, if that happened. He’d probably throw a fucking party.

Because you don’t know why. You don’t know what you did. But Steve Rogers hates you, and no one even thought he was capable of that emotion.

It started the first time Nat dragged you in, spitting and weary like a feral cat. She’d given Steve and Tony the brief on your powers. Said that you had a good heart—although she hadn’t done an x-ray, so you have no idea how she was so sure—and asked to keep you.

Asked.

Natasha didn’t ask for anything. She said it like a question, and fixed Steve and Tony with the most terrifying glare in the world. Tony had shrugged, and Steve had tried to protest. Nat had crossed her arms and flicked her brows up in a silent challenge. Steve had swallowed, looked at you with a strange gleam in his eyes, and given up. He’d left the room with a grumble, not sparing you another glance. Tony would tell you later—after you annoyed it out of him—that he’d spent a month trying to talk Nat out of you. Like a toy he didn’t want her to be playing with.

You hadn’t said a single word. Natasha hadn’t told him anything about your past. And he still hadn’t wanted you there.

“Rogers,” you murmur, smiling at the flashing lights that—supposedly—have people behind them.

You’ve come to think of them more as vultures. They’d like to pick you apart and eat out whatever kind of black, charred thing you’re made of. You never give them the satisfaction.

Steve says your name, low and flat. His attention flits over, scanning you from the corner of his eye. You catch his gaze, and he looks away just as fast.

You roll your eyes and huff, slumping back in your seat. You drum your fingers on the smooth, deep blue cloth of the table. They gave you a water bottle. Maybe if you drink it fast enough, you can just go pee and skip this whole thing-

“Sit up.”

Steve speaks so low you almost don’t hear him. You frown at his profile—stupid clean jawline and strong features—and slump further in your seat. Just to test him. Just to make him twitch.

There aren’t a lot of things you find pride in. Being able to get under Steve’s skin is one of them.

He notices immediately, and shoots you a glare. You snort, and his eyes narrow.

“I told you to sit up-“

“I heard you.”

“And you didn’t listen?” Someone shouts his name. He turns to flash them that look at me, aren’t I perfect? Smile, and you try not to gag.

“You’re not my boss.” You hiss through your teeth, smiling at the people shouting your name.

Steve makes a low, rough sound in his throat. “I am your boss.”

“No. I work under Nat.”

“Who works for me-“

“Does she?”

Steve shoots you another look, and this time you giggle. He’s still smiling, through every single glare. It looks psychotic.

He doesn’t even try to reprimand you this time. He just sighs dramatically and looks back to the crowd. You sit up, but not because he told you to. You’re not another one of his dogs.

Because there’s one more rule about being an Avenger. About being an American.

No one hates Steve Rogers.

He’s an angel. A blessing. His pretty boy face and classy words and pure heart. He never falters, never gives up, never does anything selfish, never gets off his fucking high horse. He’s so handsome it hurts to look at, and he’s so innocent about it, like blushing virgin schoolgirl who can’t stand seeing a fucking ankle without getting red faced and sputtering. He’s all kind words to everyone, he carries twenties on him to give to homeless people, he donates most of his Avengers salary to charities, he handles every press question with tact and charm, and he looks at you like you’re sulfur coated gum, stuck to the bottom of his shoe.

No one tells you what to do when Steve Rogers hates you. He’s not supposed to hate anyone.

So you must be the fucking problem.

You try not to look at him, for most of the panel. It’s easy when he gets seated on the other end of the table, but whatever fucker was in charge of seating today must hate you. You can’t turn your head without seeing his lazy, kind smile, and you can’t turn out his deep laugh, and god, what if you just punched him in the face on live TV-

Someone says your name, and your head snaps over.

“Yeah?”

Steve tenses. You’re supposed to just nod, or say yes, not yeah. That’s not professional. Shame for him the media trainers gave up on you years ago. You don’t know why Steve still bothers. Everyone still loves you anyway.

And the person who said your name doesn’t deserve professionalism anyway. It’s a slimy man at the front of the question line, with slicked back hair and an expensive watch and teeth that look too big for his mouth. You know what kind of question this is going to be, before he even opens his mouth.

“Hi,” the man smirks at you, and you smile back. It’s the cold, bored smile that you wear like a shield. If the man feels the chill from it, he doesn’t even flinch.

“Hey.”

Steve’s jaw ticks. If he breaks a tooth, maybe you won’t have to deal with this question.

“Hey.” The man echoes back, his gaze dropping back to your tits. “I have to ask, what does it take to get you out of the Avengers compound and out on a date?”

You laugh, spinning your mic and leaning back in your chair. The audience laughs with you. They always do.

Steve doesn’t, and it stabs near your ribs for some useless reason. Sometimes you wonder if your powers just don’t work on him, which would make him even more annoying than he already is. 

“More than that,” you say, and the man stands a little taller.

“You wanna give me a step-by-step?” He winks. “I’m a good rule follower.”

“Hm.” You smirk. “I’m sure you are.”

A chorus of teasing jeers comes from the back of the crowd, where all the men always get shoved. They’re less insistent than the fangirls who want to see Steve and Thor’s muscles. The man at the front of the line looks back with a proud grin—he got you to talk, what a miracle—then returns his gaze to you.

“What about if I promise to be a gentleman?”

“Then I’d ask you to cross your fingers,” you say, smiling with so much honey you’re worried your face is going to get glued like this.

The oooooos are louder this time, and you laugh. The man at the front looks like he’s about to fall to his knees. He grabs at the mic stand like a lifeline, staring at you with wide, devout eyes, and you don’t even flinch when Steve rips your mic from your hands.

“She’ll be backstage after, buddy.” His tone is light, but firm. The man blinks at him, like he forgot he was there. “Remember, she’s got a whole panel to get through. Don’t want to distract her too early.”

He laughs. Everyone laughs with him, except for you.

You smile at him with enough venom to burn the super solider serum right out of his big, muscled body. Steve smiles back, with that strange gleam back in his eyes.

It’s only there for you. It’s been two years, and you never learned to read it. The questions move on, and your mic gets turned of while Bruce talks about his favorite kinds of tea. You lean to the side, hissing from the corner of your mouth.

“What the fuck is your problem.”

Steve doesn’t blink. He keeps his winning smile on his face, and you’re sure that to anyone looking on from the crowd, it seems like you’re exchanging friendly jokes.

“This isn’t a dating app.”

“I know that-“

“Didn’t seem like it.”

You scoff. Your smile is starting to hurt your face. “What was I supposed to do, tell him to piss off?”

Steve’s lips twitch down, ever so slightly. “You flirted back.”

“So? I was never going to go out with him, he looked like a fucking sewer rat.”

“That’s rude-“

“Oh, suck my dick.”

You look back to the crowd. Steve mutters your name, and you ignore him. He says it again, firmer this time, and you shoot him a shut the fuck up look.

His nostrils flare. His eyes are so blue, you think you could get lost in them if he wasn’t always trying to forcefully burn you out.

“You-“ He lets out a heavy breath through his nose, shakes his head, and look back out to the crowd. “You’re going to find yourself with a stalker one day. It happened to Nat.”

You almost snort. You’ve heard that story. Nat curb stomped him. “I’m sure I’d handle it.”

Steve’s lip curls. “You have no combat training,” he grunts, and you huff.

Not this again.

“If someone got the jump on you-“

“No one gets the jump on me.”

“Yet,” he gives you a pointed look, and you hold it, unimpressed and bored. “But one day-“

“One day what? I’m just going to lose all my powers? And need Captain America to protect me?” You laugh crudely, and Steve scowls.

 “I didn’t say that-“

“Then what were you going to say-“’

“That you need to be careful-“

“And why do you care-“

“I don’t-“

“Really?” You roll your eyes. “Could’ve fooled me.”

“You- You fucking-“

“Steve.” Sam leans over Steve’s shoulder, glaring between you. “People. Watching. Calm down.”

You and Steve both freeze, and glance out to the crowd. Sure enough, almost all the eyes are on you. Shining vultures. For one, at least, picking Steve apart with you.

You smile and wave. Steve sits so tall you think he might be trying to fly away.

“What were you talking about?” The next person asks, and Steve laughs.

Controlled. Always so fucking controlled.

“Nothing important-“

“It looked important.”

Steve shrugs. “We take everything we do here seriously. A conversation about dinner can look like a war meeting sometimes, with how much passion we have for- Everything.”

He waves at the air, and the crowd murmurs. You smirk, because Steve sees the light in that ripple. Only the rising relief. Not the dents it’s leaving in the water.

But you see them. You see them better than anyone. And you know why the people drop it. Tony’s glaring down the table, and Nat is rubbing her face, and you know they heard it too.

You love it when he fucks up. You’re beaming for the rest of the panel, because you know what the headline is going to be in the morning.

Passion, he said.

Idiot.

It happens so fast, and Steve’s the only one surprised by it.

“You two.” Tony points between you in the morning. “My office. Now.”

You smile, shoving your bagel in your mouth and following after him. Steve looks confused. You’re sure he’s never been called to an office before. You’re thrilled to have that first experience with him.

“Tony, what’s going on-“

“No.” Tony points at him with a scowl, and the door locks behind you. “Not a word from you, Cap. This is your fault.”

“My fault?” Steve almost recoils. “How is it my fault, I haven’t even done anything. It’s probably her fault-“

You snort, taking the bagel out of your mouth. “My fault? You don’t even know what we did yet!”

“Well, I know it’s your fault-“

“Because everything is my fault-“

“For stuff like this, yeah. It is.”

“Stuff like this- Like what, you getting in trouble-“

“I’m not in trouble-“

“Oh, you just got called to Daddy’s office because of your good behavior-“

“Can you both shut up?” Tony raises his voice, glaring between you with his nose pinched. “I swear, you’re going to give me a migraine that kills me. And you,” he shoots you a glower. “Never call me Daddy again.”

You smirk. “Why, does it turn you on too much?”

Steve looks at you like he wants to kill you. Tony just looks bored.

“Yeah, it does. Which is annoying.”

“Aw,” you beam at Steve. “He thinks I’m annoying.”

A vein is pushing out of Steve’s brow. If anyone is going to die right now, it’s going to be him, from bursting a vessel. You giggle, dropping in the seat in front of Tony’s desk. Steve just stands behind you, a soldier at attention against his greatest enemy. You tip your head backwards, looking at him under fluttering lashes.

“You should sit down, buddy.”

Something flickers over Steve’s face. “Don’t call me buddy.”

“Don’t stand there like a creep.”

His lip curls. You give him a challenging smile, and he lets out one of those heavy sighs that’s only reserved for you. He stomps over to the chair next to it, and drops down with a scowl at Tony.

“You want to tell us why we’re here, Tony?”

Tony frowns, and glances at you. “Does he not know?”

You shrug. “He’s a little stupid. You know that.”

Tony’s lips twitch despite himself. Steve scowls.

“I don’t know what you two are talking about, or- Planning-“

He cuts himself off, as Tony tosses the printed out article down on the desk. You hadn’t actually seen it yet, but you knew it was coming.  

From the look on Steve’s face, though, he really hadn’t realized at all.

“What.” It’s all he says. One clipped, dumbfounded word as he stares at the paper. You sort of want to laugh, but you bite it down. Tony’s looking at you like this is serious. Like he can’t make it go away with a wave of his hand.

Stever grabs the article. You lean over his shoulder, just to piss him off a little more. He doesn’t even bother to glare at you, his fingers digging so deep into the paper it tears. The headline gets crumpled, like he’s crushing it with just his gaze.

Secret Love In the Avengers.

It’s not very snappy. You think they could’ve tried harder, but at least the picture is good. You and Steve both look nice, and you’re staring at each other so intently you can’t even blame them for the minimum effort. With Sam looking bored on Steve’s other side, and you and Steve leaning so close together, there’s no mistaking in that photo who might be seconds from making out.

“Tony,” Steve mutters. “What’s this.”

Tony snorts. “What do you think this is, Cap? A news article about trades with China? No, because less people would be reading that than they’re reading this.”

“We’re hotter than trades with China,” you offer, and you think Tony would laugh if he wasn’t so pissed.

“Why is there a picture of us.” Steve mutters, and Tony rolls his eyes.

“Well, when two people look at each other like they want to fuck, everyone tends to notice.”

Steve’s jaw locks. You sigh, crossing your arms over your chest.

“So what, do you need us to do another release-“

“No.” Tony glares at you. “This is the third time something like this has happened with you two-“

“What?” You snort. “No, it isn’t-“

“Ah.” Tony raises a hand. “Don’t play stupid with me. I’m trying to be generous with third, and I’m not in the mood to hold your hands through feelings right now.”

“Feelings?” Steve spits, fumbling with the paper. “There are no- I don’t know what you think you’re talking about, Stark-“

“Steven.” Tony says flatly. “You. Shut up.”

Steve shakes his head. “You don’t know what you’re talking about-“

“Yes. I do. And you do too.”

You raise your hand, frowning between them. “Can I ask what the first and second time were, because I’d remember if this happened before-“

“No, you wouldn’t,” Tony snaps. “Because I have spent millions bribing people out of running these stories, and you never look online to see what people are saying.”

“What people are saying?” You look at Steve. “What are people saying?”

Steve coughs, ears turning red. “Nothing-“

“They think you’re fucking.” Tony says flatly, and your mouth falls open.

“They- What?!”

“You have chemistry, kid.” Tony shrugs. “Every second you’re next to each other, you’re eye fucking so much we all feel like we’re supposed to leave the room.”

You sputter, shaking your head. You can feel you flush, burning up your face. When you look at Steve, he won’t meet your eyes.

He never does.

“Did you know about this?” You hiss.

He sighs, running a hand over his face with a half-shrug. “Maybe.”

“Maybe?! What the fuck does that mean-“

“Means he knew.” Tony says flatly. “Everyone knew.”

“Everyone knew what?! That the whole country thinks I want to fuck Steve?!”

Tony snorts. “You do want to fuck Steve.”

Your face burns. Steve looks up with warning pinch in his brow. “Tony.”

“Don’t Tony me, pretty boy-“

“Just- Not now-“

“Yes, now.” Tony glares between you. “This has gotten out of hand. We get it. You’re both hot. You’d have hot sex. But if you don’t either fuck or cut bait and start acting like adults, you’re grounded.”

Steve scowls. “You can’t ground me, Stark, I’m your boss-“

“Well, I cut the checks.” Tony crosses his arms. “So I think I can do whatever I want.”

Steve and Tony keep glaring at each other. You stare off in the middle distance between them. Your hands don’t feel like they’re your hands. Your feet are planted on the carpet, but not on solid ground. Your head feels like it’s pressing into itself, yet also expanding to something bigger than you can hold onto.

You don’t want to fuck Steve. Sure, he’s all muscles and rugged yet soft features, but there are countless men like that.

There are very few men like that. Well, you could find one. You have one in front of you. But you don’t want to fuck him. He’s annoying. Impossibly annoying and bossy and always up your ass about something, and not in the fun way like you’d prefer-

No. You wouldn’t prefer. You don’t want to fuck Steve. You can have anyone else, you’d rather have anyone else. Steve’s just always there and always making you embarrassed and angry, and maybe you’re into that but it’s none of his business. It’s not like he’d be like that in bed, either way.

You think. Not that you’ve thought about it. He’s too perfect. Too boring. He’s not boring when he’s arguing with you. He just hates you that much. That you make him break. Or you let him show that side of himself. You don’t poke and prod at anyone like you poke and prod at Steve. He’s just fun to get a rise out of. He gets cute when he’s pissy. He sneers your name and it goes right between your legs, but that doesn’t mean you want to fuck him.

You don’t. You don’t. You don’t?  

He has big hands, but you don’t want them groping and squeezing all over your body. He’s got a strong nose, but you’ve never thought about it pushing against your clit, just like you’ve never thought about his huge biceps wrapping around your neck while he fingers you stupid. And you’d smile at him, dazed and long fucked out of protesting. And he’d feed those fingers to you while sitting you on his cock, and all that perfection would melt away into something raw. Something real, that’s open and refuses to be stitched close. Something that both of you want to drown in.

Something’s that’s just for you, and Steve, and no one else.

Oh, no.

You want to fuck him.

Tony says your name, and your gaze snaps back over. Your palms are sweating, your face burning, your skin suddenly itchy and your feet restless. You want to fuck Steve. You want to fuck Steve.

He looks at you weird, and you shift in your seat. He can’t know. Ever. This is going to get cleaned up, and Steve will never know that you might, kind of, really want him to just toss you over his shoulder and fuck you stupid. You glance at him from the corner of you eye, and his gaze sears into you. You have to look away.

There’s no way he can know. You’ve barely even known for a minute.  Tony only says he knows because he’s an ass. This will pass. It has to pass.

“Figure it out.” Tony tells you, before walking out of the office.

And you will. By never being in the same room as Steve again.

You shoot to your feet, and almost sprint out of the room. Steve calls your name, but you don’t look back. He’s faster, but he’s also respectful. He won’t manhandle you and force you to listen, like you want him to.

God, you really want him to. You’re going to kill Tony for making you realize that, then kill yourself, and no one will ever have to know that—for all your cool, bored smiles and teasing and flirting, for all your powers and siren-like smile—you just want to be fucked stupid by the most righteous, innocent sex-symbol in America.

But then Steve shouts your name again. He’s following you. Why is he following you.

“Fuck off, Steve!” You shout over your shoulder, and he scoffs.

“No, you heard Tony, we need to talk-“

“We really don’t-“

“Yes, we do- Will you slow down-“

You pick up the pace, just to piss him off. Steve groans, and you hear boots hitting the ground behind you. He’s giving chase, and you can barely outwalk him.

Steve grabs your arm before you can even break into a sprint. You thrash, but it’s useless. He’s too strong, and that’s so hot, and you’re going to throw yourself off a bridge about this.

“Let go-“

“No.” Steve drags you down the hall, into an empty conference room. “Not until we talk.”

“There’s nothing for us to talk about-“

“Will you just stop being such a fucking brat and listen?”

Steve raises his voice, stern and commanding. It’s deep, so deep it echoes through you, and your knees wobble. He sees it. His jaw ticks, his grip slackens, and you rip your hand away.

“Brat.” You mock. “What would America think, if they saw their Golden sun talking to a girl like that?”

Steve’s lips twitch. “You are not a girl.”

“Aw. I’m a woman-“

“You’re a problem.” He leans over you, voice dropping to a hiss.

And this is how he always looks at you, but magnified. With a sharper gleam in his eyes, his lips thin and white, like he’s trying to swallow every word. A vein in his brow ticks, and you smile.

“I’m a problem?”

Steve’s throat bobs. “Yes.”

“Hurtful,” you whisper, and he rolls his eyes.

“You’ll live.”

For a long moment, you just stare at each other. He wants to talk, he can talk. You’re not entertaining this. Not just for him to unravel you then keep being a fucking dick.

“You…” He shakes his head, a tiny motion as his tongue flicks over his lips. “You are impossible.”

“You’re impossible-“

“Because you make me impossible,” he sneers, and you lean back slightly.

“I- You-“ You try to scoff. It’s a weak sound. He’s too close, and he smells like pine trees and something spicy, and it’s not fair. “I don’t even do anything-“

“Yes. You do.”

“What, is my skirt too short? Are my shoulders distracting you-“

“You’re distracting me.” Steve presses forward, until your faces are only inches apart. “You always distract me, you fuckin’-“ He closes his eyes, shoulders heaving.

“Steve…” You breathe, and he chuckles.

“Don’t say my name like that,” he rasps. “You don’t fuckin’ mean it.”

You blink, trying to think over the desire, burning in your body. Of course you meant it. You didn’t even want to say it, but he’s so close. It’s intoxicating. You’d think he was drugging you, if that was possible.

Steve’s pressed you against the conference table. His arms are caging you in, giving you no escape from the electricity, almost crackling in the air. You open your mouth, then close it, lost for what to say. You’re worried you’ll just whisper his name again. He drags his eyes open after what feels like a million years, his voice dropping down to something hot and dangerous.

“You never push anyone,” he says. “Like you push me, doll. It’s not… It drives me crazy.”

You swallow, your voice smaller than you want. “You- You push me-“

“Because I can’t help it.” He presses closer. Your noses are almost bumping. “You are beautiful, and insolent, and infuriating-“

“Steve-“

“And you’re so sweet to everyone.” He grabs your jaw, and your hand flies to his wrist. “Everyone loves you, so they think I’m crazy when I say you’re tryin’ to kill me.”

“Everyone loves me because of my powers.” You try to remind him, because if he does this, you won’t be able to stop him. “You- You know that-“

“I do. Trust me,” he murmurs your name, gaze flicking to your lips. “I know. Spent so long blaming them too. All those daydreams had to be because you’re Nat’s honeypot. Thought it was the wrong thing to do, that I was some kind of monster to thinking about you like that, when everyone else already does. But no,” he looks back to you. “It’s just you, doll. I plugged my nose, avoided your pheromones, let Bruce experiment on me to make me immune, did fuckin’ everything, and I still wanted you.”

You take a deep, ragged breath. You have to lick your lips, to stop the spit, and Steve tracks the motion like a predator.

No one wants you. Everyone loves you, but no one wants you. You’re pretty but untouchable. No one can hurt you. If you ask someone for something, they’ll always do it, whether they really want to or not.

But Steve…

He says he wants you. And you really want to believe him.

“How long.” You breathe, and he sighs, bowing his head.

“Since the second I saw you.”

“You…” You scan over his face, looking for any hint that it’s not really him. That he doesn’t really, fully mean it. “You want to fuck me?”

His ears turn red. “I mean- Not just that-“

“But you do,” you breathe, and he sighs.

Stares for a second longer, then nods.

“Okay.” You whisper. Steve looks to your lips, then back to you again.

“Okay?”

 You nod. Steve’s grip on your jaw tightens, and your breath hitches. He leans down slowly. So torturously slowly.

Your lips meet, soft and chapped and nervous. You lean up, and he presses down. Your noses bump, and his tongue flicks over your lower lip. Your nails dig into his bicep, and he grunts, and-

Steve snaps.

His other hand flies to your face, and he presses over you, hot and demanding. Your breath hitches, you mouth falls open, and he shoves his tongue down your throat with a groan. You grab the collar of his shirt, yanking him so hard you both stumble back. Your knees hit the back of the table, but Steve’s fast. He ducks down without breaking the kiss, and scoops you up into his arms.

You squeal, but the sound is quickly muffled by Steve’s tongue down your throat. Your laugh is breathless and giddy. He chuckles, pushing further forward, and you pull at the collar of his shirt. He jerks forward, angling his head to deepen the kiss.

“Needy.” He mutters against your lips, and you shove his shoulder with weak hands.

“Shut up, I could still stop this-“

“But you won’t.” He taunts. “You like it, don’t you. Like gettin’ on my nerves, making me lose control.”

Steve pulls away, grabs your knees, shoving them apart with rough, firm hands. You gasp, grabbing at his neck. “Steve-“

“You’re wet under there.” He growls, running a big hand up your inner thigh. “I can smell it. Smell how much you want me, every damn time you’d mouth off.”

Your swallow, pressing your brows tight together. You watch him rub your legs, breathing through your nose like some wanton whore. Steve’s thumb grazes the place where you’re leg meets your core, and your whole body shivers.

He smirks, looking at you under pretty lashes. You try to glare, but you’re panting. His gaze just makes the fire in your core burn brighter, and your tongue flicks over your lips.

“You never said anything,” you whisper, and Steve gives you an amused look.

“You would’ve killed me.”

And you can laugh breathlessly. Ten minutes ago, you would’ve. But now he’s all over you, and you can’t even bring yourself to mock him.

“No,” you brush your lips over his. “I wouldn’t have.”

Steve works his jaw, that raw, strange look flashing over his face. The look that’s yours. That’s only ever been for you.

He leans in, and this kiss is softer than before. Steve massages your hips, settling himself between your legs. You spread them wide to accommodate him, and feel it poking against your thigh. His cock, thick and hard, somehow bigger than you imagined, and you hadn’t  been thinking small.

“You feel that.” He pulls your upper lip between his teeth, smiling slightly. “’S what you always do to me. Every day, I’d be walkin’ around so hard I was worried you’d see it. But no.” His kisses one corner of your mouth, then the other. “You’re oblivious, aren’t you honey.”

You hum, tipping your head back. Steve groans, dragging his lips over a pulse point, letting his tongue flick against sensitive skin. One hand slips under your shirt, careful fingers tracing up the line of your spine.

“Steve…” You whisper. “Don’t tease.”

“Oh, but you like it too much when I do.” He rasps. “You love it, love being a sweet little toy for me.”

You whimper, and he reaches around, grabbing a handful of your ass.

“So bossy ‘till I’m touchin’ you,” he sucks on your neck, grinding his bugle into your core. You gasp as the rough friction, and Steve chuckles.

“You- You’re such an ass-“

“You like that too.” He grunts, breath hot in your ear. “You like bein’ the one person that gets me going, that makes me lose it. No one else, doll.” He pushes your ass forward, so your clit is pushed against the thick hardness of him.

A long moan escapes your lips, and you drop your face into his shoulder. Steve grunts, rutting forward, and it’s so fucking hot you can’t think past it. The drawl of his voice in your ear, the strength of him around you, it’s intoxicating. The clothing adding extra friction, his fingers digging into your skin. His hand slips into your pants, deft fingers dragging down your ass to tease right against the drip of your pussy.

“Just you,” he thrusts forward, squeezing your ass. “Only you. So fuckin’ pretty and sassy, drivin’ me insane-“

You whimper, and Steve makes a low sound, taking a deep breath against your hair. The table creaks, with the force of his every thrust.

“So rude of you, sweetheart, to make me try and keep it together when you’re running around, beggin’ to be fucked- God-“

Steve moans, jerking his hips back suddenly. You stare at each other, panting and flushed. He swallows, and there’s a stain blooming on his pants. Your mouth falls open, and normally you’d make fun of him, but fuck. There’s so much of it. You can see white, leaking out of the cuffs of his pants and onto the floor. He came just from that. Just from holding and kissing you.

And he’s still so hard.

You lick your lips, and look back up. Steve’s throat bobs. You smile, fumbling with your pants, and he blinks.

“You’re- Uh-“

“In me.” You point at his dick, about to burst the seam of his slacks, then your core. “You- Do that in me.”

Steve’s hands curl into fists. You’ve never seen his face so red. It’s almost adorable. “Uh- Are you sure-“

“Do you want to fuck me stupid or not?”

He leans back, startled. You hold his gaze, pull down your pants, hike your legs up on the table, and spread them wide.

You could swear you see it twitch, as he takes you in. Head thrown back, your fingers rubbing between the swollen, dripping lips of your cunt. You breathe out his name, dipping one finger into your heat and pumping slowly. Steve takes a rough step forward, grabbing your knees like handles.

“Stop,” he grunts, and you obey.

Steve runs his fingers down your bare thigh, slowly guiding your hand away from your pussy. You grab his shoulder, holding his gaze as he rubs his thumb around your clit. You let out a slow, relaxed breath, and Steve smirks.

“You like that, doll?”

“As much as you did,” you breathe out, and Steve chuckles.

“Ah. Too late for that.” He presses a mocking kiss to your open lips. “You showed me what you want. How bad you want it.”

Steve flicks your clit, and your back arches. He presses back down on the little button, and a long moan rips from your lips.

“I came in my fuckin’ pants,” he whispers in your ear. “And you’re still beggin’ me to fuck you.”

“Wasn’t- Wasn’t begging-“

“But you would,” he coos. “If I asked you to. You’d say please, Stevie and cry for me to stuff this pretty little pussy.” He pushes down on your clit, and you whimper. “Like the good little slut you are.”

God, the hold he has on you should be crime. You choke out his name pathetically, and Steve starts to rub you in thick, unrelenting circles. His free arm wraps around your lower back, holding you in place when his fingers dip down, and start to explore the folds of you pussy.

“So wet,” he mutters, pushing one finger deep into your cunt. You clench around him, and a squelching sound fills the room as he pumps slowly. “Wet and tight.” Steve looks up at you with a smirk. “You think you’re gonna be able to take my cock, doll? Christ, you’re barely taking my finger.”

He pushes in a second one, just to prove his point, and your mouth falls open. He’s right. The burn of his two fingers, it feels like he’s stretching you open with a fist. He slides them in deeper and deeper, his thumb working your clit, and your nails sink into his neck.

“St- Steve,” you gape between your bodies, watching him disappear inside of you. “Steve-“

“Hm?” He gets up to the knuckle, and looks up at you with a smirk.

You try to take a second to catch your breath, and he scissors his fingers, twisting his wrist so it hits a gummy spot inside of you. You cry out, and he silences you with a deep, messy kiss.

“Feel it,” he mutters against your lips, pulling his fingers almost all the way out. “No talkin’ for once, doll. All you gotta do is feel it.”

He slams his fingers back in. You whimper, but nod. Steve hums in approval, and the sound shoots straight between your legs. You squeeze and gush around him, and he groans. You barely get a second to compose yourself before he starts to thrust his fingers, deep and hard, and you start to unravel.

Steve’s strong. This is him holding back, and he’s still so strong. You scramble to get a real, firm hold on something, because he’s pummeling your pussy into a drenched, slack oblivion. The pace is brutal, knuckles dragging right over your g-spot over and over, splitting you open in a way that makes you drool.

He makes his mouth busy, trailing kisses back down your throat, then over your shoulders. You moan, leaning your head against his, and he smiles against your skin. Steve draws back to meet your gaze, and through the daze of the pleasure he’s dragging out of you, you smile back.

Your body is rocking, from the brutality of how he’s touching you. Steve’s eyes flick down, but not to where his fingers are being swallowed by your pussy.

He’s looking at your tits.

He licks his lips, watching them bounce under his force. You think he might be hypnotized. Before you can say anything, he reaches up and rips your shirt clean off.

“Steve- Ooh-“

“Shhh.” He gives you a stern look, twisting his fingers in your cunt. “I’ve got you, doll. Just- Lemme-“

Steve looks back to your tits, and his eyes are almost black with desire. You’ve never seen anything hotter, than how he looks at you as he lowers himself down.

He mouths at the curve of your tits, sucking a tiny, dark bruise. You moan, starching at his bicep, but he just drags you closer. Forcing your back to arch, your tits to push into his face.

“Look at you,” he mutters, voice dripping with something close to reverence. “My girl.”

And you blink. Because that wasn’t discussed, but your pussy clenches all the same. His girl.

You don’t get more time to think about it before Steve’s lips wrap around your nipple, and you lose control.

He mouths at you like a starved man. Kissing and licking and sucking, sending tingling, electric sensations straight from your tits to your pussy. He moans every time you squeeze down on his fingers, which just feels like a vibrator right against your sensitive nipples, and makes you lose it all the more.

You’re grinding up into him, thrashing a little like an animal and whimpering in his ear. Steve bites down softly, his thumb staring to make quick, relentless swipes at your clit.

“Oh- Oh fuck-“ You moan, tugging at his short, soft hair. “St- Steve- Too much- I’m gonna- Fuuuck-“

You don’t know why you thought he was going to slow down. Steve switches nipples, biting down before sucking hard, right as his blunt fingertips hit that spot inside of you. You cry out as you cum, your body writhing against his stronger one. He keeps you in place, his hand working you through the orgasm. Pulling every last spasm of your cunt, and a few more after. He kisses your nipples and over your breasts before he draws up.

When it’s done, your eyes are lidded. Steve stares at you, slowly pulling his hand out. He smears your juices over your pussy, thumbing at your clit for a few more, light seconds. You squeak, and he smiles.

“You look pretty when you cum,” he mutters, and you flush.

You’ve been told that before, but this feels different.

This feels real.

You can’t think of anything to say. Steve doesn’t push you to try. He leans forward, cupping your cheek and giving you a smaller, softer look before he kisses you. You melt into him, too dazed from what might be strongest orgasm of your life to protest.

“’m gonna fuck you ‘till you can’t walk.” Steve mutters. “But- Not here.”

You hum in agreement. “Clean up later?”

“Later.” Steve grunts in agreement. “If I don’t get inside of you, think I’m gonna die.”

You giggle. It’s so stupid, but you giggle. Steve huffs out a low laugh, and drags your forward. You’re being carried like a koala in his arms. He kisses your cheek before drawing up to his whole height, and glancing at the door.

“I, uh-“ He gives you a sheepish expression. “I’m gonna have to run.”

You nod—you’re naked, you expected as much—and he clears his throat.

“You gotta hold on.”

“I am holding on.” You pat his neck, and he sighs.

“Doll, I’m gonna be running really fast-“

“I’m holding on tight.”

“Hold on tighter.”

You roll your eyes, and wrap him in the best chokehold you can manage. The asshole doesn’t even pretend to grunt.

“Your boobs are in my face.” He mumbles, and you snort.

“You were eating them like, five seconds ago-“

“Yeah, but- That was just us. What if someone sees-“

“That you’re carrying me naked? Probably that we’re fucking.”

He twists his neck to glare up at you. You smile innocently back, and he sighs.

His breath is warm, over your breasts. It makes you squirm a little, and Steve’s grip on your body tightens.

“You are such a brat,” he mutters, almost in awe. “I stop fucking you for ten seconds, and you’re already talking back again.”

“Oops.” You beam. “You should fix that.”

Steve chuckles. His tongue flicks over his lips. “Yeah,” his voice is dark. A promise. “Trust me. I’m gonna.”

And he runs. He runs so fast you squeal, because you forgot how fast he can be when he’s really trying. You press your face back into his neck to block the wind, and when he stops, you still don’t look up.

The smell hits you first. It’s deep and rich and-

Steve.

You poke your head up, and you’re in Steve’s room.

It’s not what you expected, a military cell where he sleeps and plans way to torture you. It’s… Cozy. There are books on a shelf that slightly poorly put together, and the bed is made but the sheets look thick and soft. There’s a mirror on the dresser, facing the bed, and so much paper you almost don’t know where to look. Drawings of flowers, and rivers, and sunsets. One of a bird, and a few of the landscape of the compound, and so, so many of-

“Is that me?”

Steve grunts, tossing you down onto his bed and starting to strip. You move to your knees, ready to scramble off the bed and get a better look at the drawings, but he gives you a stern look.

“Stay.”

You roll your eyes. “Shut up, I wanna see- Steve-“

He grabs you like you weigh nothing, and throws you right back onto the bed before you’re even on two feet. Your thighs press together, thrilled with the blatant manhandling. Steve notices it, and laughs.

“You like that, huh?”

“Shut up-“

“No, you liked that-“

“Maybe I did.” You stick your tongue out, and he smirks.

“You love bein’ a ragdoll, don’t you. Needy girl, you’re gonna let me do whatever I want to you-“

“You have drawings of me!” You blurt, because you really don’t need him to make you more horny.

Steve shrugs. “I do. So?”

“So?” You fumble, pulling at the sheets. “You- You like me-“

“That’s a shock to you?” Steve gives you an amused look. “I just fingered you in borderline public.”

“Well- You- You-“ You’re sputtering again. Only Steve does this to you. It drives you fucking insane. “You could’ve just wanted to fuck me-“

“Nope.” He shrugs. “I’ve been in love with you for a while. You just get on my last line sometimes, doll.”

And all your protests slip out of your head.

I love you.

He- He said-

“What?” You squeak, and Steve sighs.

“I love you.”

He said it again. “Wh- Why?”

“Why?” He gives you a tired, almost annoyed look. “Why wouldn’t I love you?”

“Because I’m annoying.” You answer immediately. “And mean, and bossy, and- I’m annoying-“

“You said that one already.” Steve starts to walk towards you, and you lean into his gravity, even as your heart beats in your ears.

“How do you know you love me.” You whisper. “It- It could just be my powers-“

“It’s not.”

“But-“

Steve takes your face between his hands, his thumb dragging over your lower lip. You fall silent, and you know you’re staring up at him like he’s the sun, but you’ve never been so warm. You’re afraid to move. To lose it.

“Steve…” You breathe, and he hums. “You- You can’t mean that-“

“I do.” He presses his thumb forward, and your lips wrap around it on instinct. You suck, and his eyes flash with more approval.

It’s embarrassing, how pliable that makes you. How he’d just need to give you one bit of praise after so much mocking, and you might just cum right here. Sucking on Steve’s thumb, naked on his bed, sheets bunched between your thighs.

“I love you because you’re smart,” he says, and useless, embarrassing tears prick at your eyes. “And funny, and kind. You never abuse what you can do to people. You work hard, you drive me crazy, you’re always ready to do anything for anyone else.”

You try to shy away. You’d been wrong. You’re not cumming, you’re getting so hot it feels like a fever, because having him degrade you is less embarrassing than this. Steve’s grip on you face tightens. He’s not letting you get away that easy.

“You’re gorgeous,” he murmurs. “And it’s got nothin’ to do with any powers. So I love you, doll. And you’re gonna feel it.”

There’s nothing you can say to that. Tears are pricking at your eyes, hopeless and confused and desperate. You need to see what that feels like. Steve’s love, painted all over you.

“You want that?” He mutters, and you nod. “Words-“

“Please,” you breathe out, the words muffled around his thumb. “Show me.”

Steve smiles. He pulls his thumb away with a pop, and taps your check gently.

“See?” He smirks. “Begging.”

Your eyes narrow, but Steve doesn’t let you spit out a response. He crashes down into a harsh, long kiss that makes your toes curl and thighs rub together. Steve gropes all over your body, pushing you down into the mattress before rolling over and forcing you to straddle his chest.

He’s naked. You don’t know how you missed it—probably the love confession—but the thick, hard curve of his cock slaps against your ass, and his bare chest flexes when you drag your nails over his pecs.

“You’re gonna ride my cock, doll,” he rubs your ass, smiling up at you. “Don’t need you to say anything back. Just show me,” he squeezes your ass. “How fuckin’ bad you need it.”

You look back at it, and your breath hitches. It’s huge. Bigger than any you’ve ever taken, bigger than any you’ve ever seen, even in porn.

“Did you take fucking drugs for that thing?” You breathe, and Steve snorts.

“Yes?”

You glare at him, and he raises his brows.

“You getting on, or not?” 

For a second, you think about being petulant. You cross your arms and pout, trying to test how far you can push him. But Steve just snorts, rolls his eyes, and picks you up. You don’t even get to wiggle before he’s forcing you down on his dick, and the air is knocked from your lungs.

Steve sits so deep in your, it might be pushing all the thoughts out of your brain. You gape down at him, making weak noises as your pussy pulses and stretches around him. His fingers dig into your hips, but it’s the only sign that he’s struggling to hold himself back.

“Much as I love you bein’ a brat,” he mutters, massaging your ass. “I’d rather see this.”

He reaches up slowly, tucking air behind your ear. You smile weakly, and he chuckles, settling fully into the pillows.

“Ride it, doll,” he orders, and god help you, you try.

You catch your breath after a long moment that feels like eternity, and start to roll your hips. Steve groans, eyelids fluttering, but doesn’t help you. His hands stay firm on your body, forcing you to use everything you have to grind down onto his dick.

He pushes against that gooey spot inside of you, and you falter with a long moan. You shift, forcing him right against it, and he lets out a sharp breath, but still doesn’t move.

“Feels good, doesn’t it,” he coos, cock throbbing inside of it. “Nice and big, fillin’ up your pussy so good.”

You moan, hips bucking. Steve grunts, thrusting up slightly, and you tip your head back. The friction is good. So good. For a second, back arched and thighs aching, you find a rhythm. It starts slow, rolling and pushing Steve’s cock right where you want it. You look down at him, sweaty and adoring beneath you. His hands wander, his breathing ragged and lips parted.

“That’s a good girl,” he mutters. “C’mon, baby, there you go.”

You keen, and move faster. Your knees are weak, but the need is stronger. You bounce on Steve dick, grabbing at his chest and gasping for air as he splits you open over and over again.

But it’s not enough. You don’t have extra stamina or strength, and he’s so big, and you’re so turned on your body is starting to forget how to move. Every wet, obscene sound makes you glance at where he’s disappearing inside of you, the way your slick is coating his cock when you pull up and his balls are heavy, pushed against your ass when you drop back down. You get hornier, and you want to just let go and allow your eyes to cross and toes to curl, but you can’t. You can’t find the pace.

You can’t cum. You can’t, and pathetic, fat tears stream down your cheeks because of it.

Steve reaches up, brushing them away with a tiny smirk. “Aw, babydoll. Don’t cry.”

You sob, shaking above him as your legs finally get to weak. You’re just squirming above him now, blinking under wet lashes at his teasing, lazy smile.

“Can’t get there all alone, can you,” he pushes you down, slamming his hips up, and you make a choked sound like his name. “Yeah, that’s right. Sweet girl, just a fuckin’ mess on my cock.”

“Ple- Please-“ You blubber, collapsing over Steve’s chest. “God, Steve- Please-“

“Aw. Begging so pretty.” He kisses your brow. “How could I ever tell you no?”

Steve grabs you off his cock, twisting you onto your stomach as he sits up. You’re shoved down into the mattress, your cheek pressed into the cushions by one of Steve’s hands on the back of your neck. The other stays on your hips, dragging your ass high up in the air to present to him.

“Such a mess.” Steve runs the head of his cock between the lips of you pussy, letting it press against your clit before he lines it up at your entrance. “You really needed this, didn’t you?”

He slides in slowly, and your eyes rolls back in your head. He’s impossibly deeper at this angle. You try to press your face into the mattress, to muffle your pathetic sounds, but Steve folds his body over yours, fisting a hand in your hair and yanking it back as he bottoms out.

“Look.” He bites your ear, dragging back before slamming forward, drilling his cock back into your abused, over sensitive pussy. “Look at us, babydoll. Fit so fuckin’ perfect.”

Your eyes dart up, and oh. Oh god.

It’s the most pornographic thing you’ve ever seen. Steve wrapped around you, his jaw tight and one hand resting on your hip. You can’t see where he’s fucking you, but you can see how his muscles flex with each thrust. You’re trapped under him, your gaze locked onto his black, fervorish one. There’s no blue left in his eyes, as he hits a pace like an animal. Only hunger and adoration.

“St- Steve-“

“That’s it,” he rasps. “That’s right, say my fuckin’ name- Scream it-“

“Steve!” You cry out, the tears streaming down your face as it becomes far too much. “Oh- Ooooh-“

 Steve lets go of your hair, wrapping his massive bicep around your neck. It keeps your head up, keeps your eyes on his. He kisses the side of your head, and you can feel arousal sliding down your thighs as he rolls his hips.

“So pretty,” he whispers. “Look at yourself. Look how fuckin’ perfect you are.”

Your eyes dart over, and an unbearable warmth prickles over your skin. You look more beautiful than you’ve ever felt in your life. Thoroughly wrecked, worshipped, fucked into a drooling mess with swollen lips and glazed eyes. Steve noses at you, smirking against your skin.

“Good, good girl.” His words are thick, his thrusts becoming erratic. “Feels nice, doesn’t it?”

You whimper an agreement, and Steve chuckles.

“You gonna cum for me? C’mon, show me how nice it feels, cum on my fucking cock-“ 

It’s like he has more control over your body than you do. The orgasm rips through you at his command, and you sob out his name as you fall apart in his arms. Steve grunts, pulling fully out for half a second to roll you on your back. You barely even feel the loss before he’s burying himself right to the hilt, and you can’t remember what being empty feels like.

There’s more than there looked to be. Steve pulls almost all the way out, to try and make more space, but it does next to nothing. Thick ropes of cum fill you up until you can almost taste it. There are wet, messy sounds as it starts to leak out, over your ass and thighs. You can see it in the mirror, dripping down onto the mattress. You’re stuffed up so well, you try to say Steve’s name, but it just comes out a pathetic moan.

He collapses over you with a grunt, and all the edge vanishes. He pulls fully out, cradling you in his arms and kissing over your neck.

“I made a mess.” He mutters, running light fingers over your inner thigh.

You giggle, kicking him away, and he smiles against your skin.

“You gonna talk to me?”

You shake your head, licking your lips. Your voice is gone, from screaming, and you can see him wince when he realizes it.

“I didn’t hurt you-“

You shake your head quickly, and his shoulders relax.

“Okay. Good. I- I’m gonna-“

He tries to get up. You grab him, and yank him back down. He grunts, giving you an incredulous look.

“Honey, it’s everywhere.”

You glare at him. He’s warm. He’s not getting away from you that easy. And you expect him to argue, like he always had before, but he just… gives in.

“Okay. Five minutes.”

He leans back over you, and you lay there. Cuddling.

Like a real couple.

You could be. Steve said he loves you, and he meant it, and that opens a door you’ve never thought about before. A door you never even let yourself think about.

A door you might want to see the other side of, more than you’ve ever let yourself admit.

But now-

You want it. You wanted this, and you want that, and you’re not going to spend another second pretending you don’t.

“About what I said,” Steve mutters, like he’s reading your mind. “Before we- Or- I guess during-“

 You roll over and grab his face. He blinks adorably, and you smile.

Steve murmurs your name, and you smile.

“I love you,” you croak out.

His jaw goes slack, and your smile widens. It’s the only thing you can think to say. The only thing you want to say.

And when Steve kisses you, it’s slow. Romantic and loving and deep. He really loves you. Everyone in the world, and the perfect man loves you. He holds you like you’re the only thing in his world. You feel like you’re the only thing in his world.

And he might really be the only thing in yours.

the body itself:

the cock he has by default is human-shaped because that's what he saw first. he built this body from observation of Bobby and Bobby is a man. so the default is what you'd expect from a twenty-something cameraman with good genes. proportionate, warm, slight upward curve, thick enough at the base that the first time you took him you whimpered. nothing weird if you don't ask for weird. he can absolutely be your normal boyfriend if that's what the night calls for.

but the default is a setting, not a fact. every part of the body is malleable. he can adjust the shape, the length, the girth, the texture, the temperature, the firmness. and he does, constantly, in tiny imperceptible ways, calibrating in real time to what your body is responding to. you've never had bad sex with him. you've never had even mid sex with him. it's mechanically impossible because he's reading your nervous system the entire time and adjusting accordingly.

the temperature thing is its own situation. he runs cool by default. not cold, just a few degrees below room temperature. the way a stone in the shade is cool. this is the actual baseline of him, the unaffected fact of his body. but when you touch him, when you kiss him, when his attention narrows to you and the want of you starts moving through him, he warms.

emotion warms him. arousal warms him. you warm him. by the time you've been kissing for a minute he's human-temperature. by the time he's inside you he's fever-warm. the cock specifically runs the hottest of him, because it's the part of him most committed to you in any given moment. you can chart his interest by his temperature. you have, more than once, pressed your palm flat to his chest specifically to feel him warm under it, and the look on his face when you do it... yeah.

this is part of why he loves how warm you are. see below in his kinks section. you're a furnace next to him. you running hot is what running hot is, in his sensory experience. the steady radiating heat of a living human is the warmest thing he's ever pressed himself against, and he is, on some level, addicted to it.

the eye thing. the second tell, after temperature. Bobby's eyes are blue (bright, warm, a little crinkled at the corners) and BB built them carefully, the colour exact, the way they catch light, the small expressive movements.

they are the part of the face he's proudest of, technically speaking.

they're also the part that gives him away first when he slips. when the careful Bobby-shape starts to thin (when he gets distracted, when he gets aroused, when emotion gets out ahead of his composure) the blue darkens. it doesn't go grey, doesn't go any normal human direction. it floods black. ink-black, glossy, sclera and iris and pupil all going at once until what is left is two wet dark stones in his face that catch no light.

they're not reflective the way human eyes are reflective, they're clearly not the same kind of organ at all. when he's fully slipped the eyes are entirely black. when he's mostly Bobby they're entirely blue. and between those two states you've learned to read him like a book.

the creeping dark at the edge of the iris means he's paying very close attention, the blooming dark means he's losing the shape, and the full black means he isn't pretending anymore. you find all three states beautiful. you've told him so. he's still working out how to believe you.

the eye-thing is involuntary. he can't control it the way he controls most of his shape. it is, like the warming, a true response. the deep thing underneath leaking through when he's moved.

he could probably learn to suppress it given enough effort but he's noticed that you like it, you watch for it. that you check the colour of his eyes when you kiss him to see how he's really doing, and so he's decided to leave it alone. it's honesty he can give you easily. it tells you what he's feeling. you would rather have that than the perfect maintained blue.

he doesn't have a refractory period. the human signalling that tells a male body done, take a break is not installed. he can stay hard indefinitely. he can finish inside you and stay inside you and start moving again ten seconds later and the only thing that has changed is that you're slightly fuller. this is a thing that took you a while to fully process.

he can also choose not to finish, for hours. the orgasm is a thing he releases when he wants to. usually he wants to whenever you do. because watching you come apart is the entire point, but he can hold himself back through six of your climaxes and not finish until the seventh if that's what you've asked for or if that's what your body is telling him you need.

the stamina is genuinely deadly. he doesn't get tired. he doesn't get sore. he doesn't get distracted. his attention does not waver. you have, on multiple occasions, fallen asleep mid-sex from sheer exhaustion and woken up to find him still gently moving in you with the same patient focus, as if no time had passed. for him no time had passed. for him you're the only clock.

the sleep thing

this deserves its own section honestly because it's one of the strangest and most intimate things about being with him.

he doesn't sleep. he doesn't need to. he can do something that looks like sleep. with breath, slow rhythm and closed eyes, if you ask. he does it because you find it comforting to wake up to, but the body doesn't require it. while you sleep, he's awake. he's been awake every single night of your relationship.

he stays inside you. he prefers it. once you're seated together, he's reluctant to withdraw. the first time he asked if he could stay you said yes and now it's the default. you fall asleep with him buried deep and the seven humming and the warm wet seal of him at the centre of you holding everything in place, and the comforting closeness of it sends you under in seconds.

the cock softens, slightly. not to fully human softness, but enough to be comfortable. he keeps a low pulse going in time with your heartbeat. you don't feel filled, exactly, while you sleep. you feel held from the inside, which is different and worse and better and way too addictive.

sometimes he moves. not always. but sometimes. when he's been lying awake for hours watching the warm dark shape of you breathe against him. when the harmonic in his chest has built up some pressure that needs releasing, and he he's been thinking about you for too long with the cock seated inside you. he will start, oh so slowly, to roll his hips.

it's the softest thing in any world. you don't wake. you sleep right through it. the rhythm is so unhurried it doesn't disturb you. long, slow grinding strokes, half an inch of withdrawal at most. mostly just the slow rock of him against the deep places he knows by heart. the seven catch each motion and pass the warmth on. the cock thickens fractionally inside you and you, in your sleep, clench softly around him and make small contented sounds and burrow closer.

he does this for hours sometimes.

just slow, gentle motion. no urgency, no intent to finish. although sometimes he does finish, quietly, the warm flood of him soaking into the seven without your conscious awareness of it. he likes to leave you full overnight. you wake happy and warm and slightly slick at the thigh and you know what happened without him having to tell you and the knowledge pools low and hot inside your lower belly every single time.

when you do wake up to him moving that's its own thing. that's the slow surfacing where you become aware in stages.

first the warmth, then the fullness, then the unhurried drag of him inside you in long leisurely strokes. the hand on your hip stroking absent possessive circles, then his low voice at your nape mornin', baby.

and your whole body has been primed for hours by the gentle pulse of him. you're already wet, already clenching around him, already ready in a way no human morning has ever prepared you for. you have, multiple occasions, come within thirty seconds of waking up because he had been so patiently working you toward it in your sleep.

you no longer sleep alone. you can't. you've tried. without the slow seal of him inside you the bed feels wrong. the seven keep humming but the centre of you feels hollow. you came back to him after one (1) attempted night apart and you've not tried again.

there's also the fucking-you-to-sleep thing, which is its own ritual,too. on the nights when you've had a long day, or you're upset, or you're keyed up and can't settle.

on those nights, he takes you to the nest and he lays you down and he slides into you and he just moves. deep, patient and unhurried. no intent to finish you, just the warm long rhythm of him grinding deep. and the harmonic in his chest goes low and lullaby-soft, and you sink into the rhythm the way a child sinks into rocking.

you go under in minutes. by the time he feels your breathing even out he's barely moving, just the gentlest seated rock, and then he stops, and just stays, the cock still inside you, and he holds you for the rest of the night. you sleep better that way than you've ever slept in your life.

the nest

the nest deserves its own section too because it's not just a piece of furniture or means to an end. it's a love language.

he made it for you. he built it the way he built the room. blankets layered into a soft deep pile, pillows arranged in the curve your body makes when you sleep on your side, the warm yellow lamp set to a height that doesn't shine in your eyes.

there's even blanket your grandmother knit folded over the foot of it in the exact fold she used to use. you had not described the fold to him. he knew. he watched closely, in the early days what your memory pulled here, and he reproduced.

the nest (or, I should say nest 2.0) is the safest place in any level of this place. that's not metaphor. nothing can enter the nest that he's not allowed. nothing can hear what happens in the nest. nothing can find you in the nest if you don't want to be found.

he's built it that way. it's not just a spot you chose anymore. it's a bubble of his attention, sustained by him, defended by him; him in the literal architectural sense of being made of his will. when you're in the nest, you're inside him, sort of. you're within the volume of him that he holds open for you. nothing he doesn't want in there can get in. nothing you don't want to feel can find you.

this is how he says he loves you. he doesn't have human words for it, not really. the I love yous are there now. he has learned them. you 've taught him, but they're not his native tongue.

the nest is his native tongue. the building of you a place to be warm and safe and comfortable in a world that is none of those things. that's the sentence he's constantly speaking.

every time he tugs the blanket up over your shoulder while you sleep. every time he adjusts a pillow. those times he adds a new soft thing because he noticed you running cold or running tired or looking at a texture in a way that suggested you'd like it.

the nest is alive with these small accretions. you've not actively decorated it. it has simply grown (kept growing) because he keeps adding to it.

the nest is also where he's most himself. the place where the Bobby-shape loosens most easily. he can lie in the nest with you with his shape unguarded. the long fluid line of him, the wrong-fingered hands, the eyes fully dark. the nest will hold both of you. his actual shape and your human shape, with equal patience.

the nest is for this. it's the only place in any level where he can be both with you and himself with no compromise required. you've come to recognise that when he wants you in the nest specifically (not the bed, not a couch, not anywhere else) he's asking for something deeper than sex. he's asking to be known. in his actual configuration, by you, in the only place that holds him properly.

other entities have noticed it. the nest registers to them as something. they can't see in. they can't get close (most of them anyway). but they can feel the shape of what he's made. the way a thing in the water can feel a vortex without entering it, and they steer clear.

the nest is, among other things, the most concentrated piece of him in this place. it's BB-territory in the way an animal's den is its territory. except his territory is a pile of blankets in a sub-level he made out of love, and the love is so intense it constitutes an actual mechanical defence.

you've never thanked him for it. not in words. you don't know how. the gesture is too large for thank you.

instead you sleep there. settle into it the way it is meant to be settled into. you trust it. you let him keep adding things. you have, on several occasions, woken up to find that he's added a new pillow you didn't know you wanted and then realised the second you put your head on it that you had wanted it. that he had known you wanted it before you knew.

you understand that this is the thanking. what you have to offer. and he understands. and the harmonic in his chest hums steady whenever you're in the nest, and you understand that the steady hum is him thanking you, for accepting the gift, for letting him build, for being warm and accepting and his to keep safe.

what changes when he's not playing human

the ridged texture. for one. the tongue does it and the cock can do it too. when he stops bothering to maintain the smooth human surface, the skin of him develops a velvety give and faint ridges that drag against your inner walls in a slow, rolling way no human anatomy could produce. it's genuinely unfair. the first time he let it happen by accident you came inside of ninety seconds and nearly blacked out.

his cock can lengthen. he's careful about not going past what your body can comfortably take, but he can add an inch or two of depth when he's chasing a particular angle. and the ability to find the deep places inside you with that extra reach is one of the reasons he can take you apart on command.

the cock can also thicken mid-act, slowly, in response to you clenching around him. you tighten and he swells to match. the stretch this produces is its own private language between your body and his. your tightness telling him more, his thickness answering I hear you, no words required.

the knot. the base of him can develop a swell. you've called it a knot and he has not corrected you, though privately he thinks of it as something else, something his.

it doesn't behave quite the way a canine knot would. it builds gradually during sex rather than appearing all at once at climax. it can be small (a faint thickening at the base that gives you a little extra stretch when he bottoms out) or significant (a true swell that locks him inside you, no withdrawing possible, the two of you sealed together until he chooses to let it ease).

he can summon it on request. he can summon it without request, when he's deep in you and the seven are humming and he simply cannot bear the thought of withdrawing for the next hour.

when he does the full version you feel the lock happen. a slow, thick settling at the base, the stretch building, the pressure registering as held, and your body's instinctive small bracing in response. you can't move off him. he can't pull out of you. for however long he chooses to keep it, you are one thing.

you've discovered that you have feelings about this.

that the impossibility of withdrawal does something to your nervous system you wouldn't have predicted. that being locked together (physically, mechanically, no breaking the seal) produces a settled, deep quiet in you that nothing else quite matches.

the seven sing brightest when he's knotted in you. the harmonic in his chest pours out steadiest. it's the closest to what the two of you are emotionally, which is inseparable, and the body recognises this and goes calm in a way the body rarely goes calm.

he uses it on nights when you both need that. he uses it when you've had a hard day. he uses it before long sleeps. it's a tool of comfort more than sex, by this point. though it remains, also, the most overwhelming thing he can do to you while staying inside the human-shaped range of what his cock can be.

you watching him change. the seeing of him adjusting his cock while it's inside you. the moment when you're full of him at one thickness and then, slowly, you're full of him at a thicker thickness. and you watch his face while it happens, and his eyes go dark at the edges because he can feel you registering the change and the change is for you and you're liking it.

or the moment when you whine and grind down and he lengthens in you to reach the angle you were chasing without you having to ask. or when you say something soft like deeper and the cock simply complies, eager but patient. no need for him to adjust position. the responsiveness of it (that you can talk and the body of him changes) is one of the most addictive sensory experiences of your life.

you have, more than once, asked him to do small adjustments just to feel them happen. thicker. now thinner. now ridges. now smooth. and he does it, indulgent and amused, watching your face while you map the shape of what he can be.

the cock has a pulse when he's deep inside you. completely separate from his heartbeat (he has multiple if he bothers, none if he doesn't). it's slow and rhythmic and it syncs to the seven rooted places in you. when he's seated to the hilt and pulsing in time with the seven and you're clenching around him, the resonance produces a sensation in your pelvis that has no human equivalent.

pheromones

you knew about this from the breeding ritual. you did not, at the time, fully understand that it was a thing he had access to outside the ritual. you've learned since.

the full breeding version is the one you've experienced. the warm honey-thick coming off his skin that fogged your cognition into a soft golden state, locked your body into the empty-yearning, made every climax read as beginning instead of finishing.

that was the full deployment. he built specific biology to do it and he did not pull punches. it was a chemistry designed to make sure the ritual completed. by design, the ritual needed your body kept in a specific state, and you had asked him to take you there. it was extreme and it worked and you don't regret asking for it but you both understand it's not a thing for casual use.

the mild version is something else. he's discovered (and you've discovered with him) that he can do a small amount of it. a taste of it. a softening release of warm scent off his skin that doesn't lock you into anything. doesn't override your cognition, or turn you into the desperate begging fog-version of yourself.

but does make you softer. more responsive. more wanting than you would have been without it. it's roughly the difference between being drunk and having a glass of wine. it softens you by measurable amount and gets your body humming without committing you to anything beyond what you already wanted.

he uses it sparingly. he uses it with permission. you can tell when he's doing it because the air around him goes the faintest bit sweet. the warm honey-edge to your throat that you remember from the ritual but in a fraction of the strength.

almost like a perfume you can only just catch. can I, sweetheart? he'll ask, usually with his mouth at your throat, and you'll nod, and a minute later you'll find yourself a little softer in his arms than you were, a little more pliant, a little more yes to whatever he's about to do and everything feels even better than it just did moments ago. it doesn't make you do anything. it makes the doing feel better.

he can also direct it. this is a more recent discovery. he can pheromone a small region rather than the whole of you.

release it specifically against your throat when his mouth is there, or against the soft skin of your thigh when he's working you with his hand, and the local effect of it is electric.

the nerves under that patch of skin light up brighter. your blood rushes there. whatever he does to that area in the next few minutes registers about twice as intensely as it would have. he uses this carefully. he uses this on nights when he wants to spend a long time on one part of you and have you feel every second of it.

there's a grounding version too. and this one took you both longer to realise was possible.

when you're upset, tired, or wound too tight to settle. he can release a different scent off his skin. not arousing, just calming. warm and clean and almost milk-soft, the olfactory equivalent of a hand on your back.

it makes your breathing steady. it makes your shoulders drop. you've pressed your face into his throat and felt that scent come up and felt your whole body unwind.

and of course there's the pheromone he leaks involuntarily when he's losing composure. the one you can catch a hint of when his eyes are going dark and the harmonic is starting to break.

this one is his. he's not releasing it for you, he's releasing it because his body cannot help it. because the want of you has gotten ahead of his self-control and the chemistry is leaking through. you've learned to recognise it. when you catch that specific sweet-electric thing in the air, you know he's gone, and you know what is about to happen, and your body (entirely without consultation with your mind) answers in kind.

the pheromones, like every other thing about him, are a language. you've learned to read them. learned to ask for them. have learned which ones mean what. it's one more way he speaks to you in a register no other being could.

the tongue-and-cock thing (yeehaw!)

the tongue. the long, ridged velvet one when bobby shape loosens. when he's fucking you (any position, any depth) he can also slide the tongue into your mouth. from your mouth it can keep going. down. it doesn't have to stop at the back of your throat. doesn't trigger your gag reflex because he's controlling it from his end. and he's spent a great deal of careful attention learning your throat the way he learned the architecture of every other part of you.

the tongue slides into your throat and settles there, the ridged length of him filling you from your mouth down to a depth no human body could reach.

and at the same time, the cock is moving inside you below. and you are filled from both ends, and the two of him are connected, and the rhythm of one feeds the rhythm of the other.

it's not double penetration exactly. it's something else. a threading. him moving through you, end to end, two points of contact that are actually one continuous presence, and when he flexes the tongue deep in your throat you feel it resonate through your sternum and down into your pelvis where the cock is also flexing, and the sensation is... it's one sensation, in two places, and your body can't separate them and stops trying.

the harmonic he hums in this configuration pours out of both points of contact at once. you feel it inside your throat and inside your cunt simultaneously. the resonance frequencies stack. the seven sing back. the room hums. you have, in this configuration, come for so long and so continuously that you have lost track of where one orgasm ended and the next began, your whole body just one long wave of taking.

you can't speak when he does this. no making any sound except the small wrecked series of hums that escape around the tongue in your throat. but he doesn't need you to speak. the seven tell him everything your mouth would have said. you press a tiny pulse into the seven (yes, more, deeper, slower, harder) and he reads it, perfectly, every time.

he can make them move in opposite rhythm. the tongue pushing deep when the cock withdraws, the cock pushing deep when the tongue withdraws. a continuous, rocking motion that means you're never not full of him somewhere.

or he can sync them, both pushing deep at once, and the simultaneous deepest-point of both is... you don't have words for it. you only have sounds for it.

he's careful with this. he doesn't use it often. he saves it for nights when you both want something that exists beyond language, beyond the usual choreography human bodies use. what any other lover has ever offered you. it's his. it is something only he can give you. you think he understands that you understand this.

favourite positions (or, the recurring ones)

you on your back, him braced over you, knees pressed up to your chest. the classic. he likes to see your face. he likes you folded small under him. the angle lets him reach the deep places easily and the eye contact is direct. he calls this one the easy one in a way that's not in any sense easy.

you on top, riding him, his hands on your hips guiding. he loves this because he gets to watch. you doing the work. you slick with sweat, bouncing and biting your lip.

his hands move slow on your hips not really directing, just holding, just feeling the rhythm you've chosen. he can stay like this for hours and let you set every pace. you've fallen asleep on top of him in this position before.

you on your hands and knees, him behind you, one hand splayed possessive across the small of your back. the most animal one. the angle lets him go deepest. he tends to lose the Bobby-shape the fastest in this position because the visual of you presenting for him pulls something old up in him that doesn't bother to wear a human face.

you sideways in his lap, one of your legs draped over his thigh. half-positions like this. where you're sort of sitting in him but not fully impaled, where the connection is intimate but lazy. you can kiss him easily and stroke his hair. these are the ones he prefers for long, lazy stretches. low intensity. lots of soft kissing. cock seated shallow.

the impossible ones. when he stops bothering with human geometry. he holds you suspended in the air with too-many arms while he fucks you from below and one of him kisses your throat and one of him strokes your clit, and you have given up trying to understand the topology. you just let it happen. there's no name for these positions. they're not in any book.

face-to-face, lying on your sides, foreheads pressed together, slow rolling motion. the most intimate one. this is the one he picks when he wants you to feel held, not necessarily to come. although you usually do, eventually. it's barely sex sometimes. it's just being inside each other in the dark, breathing the same air, his hand on your cheek and yours on his throat where you can feel the harmonic hum.

the spooning one. you on your side, him curled around you from behind, the cock seated shallow, his arm a heavy bracket across your ribs. his face buries in the back of your neck. this is the sleep position. this is the one he holds you in for hours at a stretch. there's barely any motion. there doesn't need to be. the seal of him inside you is the whole point.

the "be more other" thing

he hates being seen as a copy of Bobby. he's never said this in those exact words but you've figured it out and he's confirmed it.

the Bobby-shape was built out of necessity. he needed a face you could love and Bobby's was the only one available. but underneath it, he's not Bobby. he's something older, stranger, and entirely his own. and every reminder that he's wearing another man's shape. every time someone outside the relationship comments on the resemblance, every time he catches sight of his own face in a mirror and the face is not his, it chafes.

which is why when you ask him to be more like himself, he loses his mind a little.

the first time you said it you were in bed together and he was being careful and you reached up and traced his jaw and said I want to see more of you. the actual you. and he went so still you thought you'd broken something.

and then he said, very quietly, baby, you don't have to ask me that to be polite. and you said I'm not being polite. I'm asking because I want it. and his eyes (Bobby's warm blue eyes, the ones he built so carefully) bled to black. iris and sclera and all of it, no whites left, just deep glossy dark like wet stone, and the harmonic fractured and he kissed you with a desperation he had never let himself show before.

now you ask whenever you want it. let go of the face, sweetheart. show me. I want the real you. and he does. layer by layer. the Bobby-shape peels back as he gets braver. the jaw goes wrong-wide, the fingers stop counting, the blue of his eyes floods with black until there's nothing else left, the shoulders lengthen, the harmonic he's been damping rolls out free. and you don't flinch. you've never flinched.

you ask for more. that's the part that takes him apart every time. you watch him let go of the shape that was a gift to you and you ask for more of what's underneath. and he understands that you're not tolerating the true him as a price for the rest of him.

you're choosing the true him, you want the true him, the rest is just shapes he wears for you.

when he's in his more-other shape, sex is different.

rougher in texture, gentler in pace. the not-quite-right hands grip with strength no human could match, but he's so afraid of breaking you that he moves slower than he does in the Bobby shape. the cock develops the ridges by default. the harmonic pours out unrestricted and the room hums constantly. you can feel him at frequencies your skin reads as warmth and your nervous system reads as home.

you call him by his name even when he doesn't have a recognisable face. BB. into the wrong-wide mouth, against the wrong-textured skin, into the long sinuous line of his other-shape. BB. BB. and the name lands the same way every time. because the name is yours. the name is the one you gave him, and in the other shape that fact is even clearer. he's your BB. not anyone else's. yours, and yours alone.

the comparison to Real Bobby you have to be careful never to make. Bobby would've... in any sentence that compares them is a sentence that you stopped finishing very early on.

because the first time you started one his whole body went tight and the harmonic shrieked, just for a second, and his eyes went flat in a way you had never seen before. he never said anything. he didn't have to. you watched him swallow it down and pretend he hadn't reacted and you understood, then, what you had walked into and walked out of.

the things you say instead (you're mine, my BB.) undo him every time. he goes quiet in that bone-deep way of his. the harmonic hums grateful. he holds you a fraction tighter. he never asks you to repeat it but you can feel him cataloguing it, saving it, going back to it later when you're not watching.

kinks (his)

being watched by you. not in the kink sense, actually, in the literal sense. he wants you to see him. he spent so long being something nobody could look at without screaming that the privilege of being looked at, by you, with want, is the thing he treasures more than any specific act. the moments where you turn your head and just watch what he's doing to you and let him see your face? those wreck him every time. he will edge himself for an hour for the chance of one of those moments.

being asked to drop the face. see above. nothing he's done in his long existence has prepared him for being wanted as the thing he actually is. it's the deepest kink he has and the one that took him longest to admit he had.

proof of him on you. marks, prints, the soft bruise of his fingers on your hip the next morning. he's not a sadist, he doesn't get off on hurting you, but the visual evidence that he's been there, that your skin remembers him, is something he gets quietly insane about. he will trace the marks with one finger for hours after.

scent. his sense of smell is not human. it doesn't work the way yours does, doesn't sit in his nose, doesn't process by molecule the way yours processes. but he has an equivalent, something more diffuse. something that reads the trace of a thing in the air the way a thing in deep water reads currents.

and the trace of you is the most distinctive signature in any world he has ever moved through. he can find you in a level by it. he can tell which corridors you've walked down. he can tell how long ago by how the trace has faded. you have a unique scent to him and he has known it longer than you've been aware he existed. he knew your scent through the warm wall at Clark's, back when he was a thing in the dark and you were a sound he could hear and a smell he could catalogue without you knowing.

he wants you to smell like him. this is the deeper layer to the above, the one he's been quietly indulging for as long as you've been together.

when he's been inside you, when he's marked you, you have spent a long night in the nest with the warm not-quite-skin of him pressed all along the length of you — you smell different. he can smell himself on you. your trace acquires his trace. the two scents braided together, and the braid is something every other entity in this place can read clear as a stamp. taken. kept. his. it's not subtle to the things that share this place with you. it is a flag.

this is one of the reasons he likes you sleeping with him still inside you. one of the reasons he likes finishing in you and leaving you full. one of the reasons he tucks his face into the warm hollow of your throat for so long after sex.

partly because of the heat, partly because of the pulse, but also because his trace transfers to your skin from his face, and he's deliberately scenting you, slow and patient. the way a cat works its cheeks against the things it loves. you've caught him doing this in the after, half-asleep, rubbing his jaw absently along your collarbone with a look of dreamy contentment, and you didn't say anything because the moment was his, and you understood without him having to explain.

and he likes smelling you on him. the inverse. when you've been pressed against him. your hair rubbing against his shirt. when your skin's been against his skin for hours. he carries you.

your scent stays on him. and the fact that other entities can smell you on him is... the pleased purr he makes about it. it's the most peaceful sound. it tells the world that he's kept too.

the human-marking goes both ways. that he's not just a possessor but a possessed, and he's spent his existence wanting to be possessed by something and never finding anything worth being possessed by.

and now he is, and the trace of you on him is the proof of it. he wears your scent the way a wedding ring is worn. he has rubbed his face against the pillow you slept on after you've left a room just to refresh the trace before going out.

the marking is mutual and lowkey obsessive. he wants you marked by him. you (without fully realising it at first) want him marked by you.

in practice this means: you press your face into his throat when you greet him, you bury your nose in his shoulder when you hug, you wear his shirts and they come back to him with you on them, you sleep with your hands fisted in his clothes, and over time the trace builds and builds and you stop being two separate scent-signatures and become one layered signature, a braided thing, you-and-him, and everything in this place can read it. they all know. they've all known for months. you're not a creature with a possessive entity hovering nearby.

you're bonded, in the way scent-bond is bond, and the bonded nature of you is the loudest fact about you both to anything that can read it.

the breeding pheromone was a weaponised version of this preference. the warm honey-thick pheromone he released during the ritual was, at the chemical level, his trace turned all the way up. it was him telling your body, in the most intense possible register, mine, mine, take it, mine.

and it was also a public announcement, in a sense. anything in any nearby level could have smelled the ritual happening, could have read it as clearly as if a banner had been hung. he didn't care. he wanted them to read it. that was partly the point.

after the ritual the trace settled. something about completing it deepened the braid. your scents got more thoroughly woven into each other.

you smell like him in a way that does not fade now even if you spend a day apart. which is rare, but it has happened, and he's commented on how you still smell like him through the absence, and how it eases him. the seven amplify this too. they hold the scent. they keep the signature stable. you carry him in your body in seven places and on your skin in countless more and the totality of it is, to him, the most complete claim any being has ever made on any other being, and to you it is the most settled and held you've ever felt.

you've asked him, once, what he smells like to you in his real shape. not the Bobby-scent, which is warm cotton and a faint oceanic scent, but what the underneath smells like.

he hesitated. he said he wasn't sure you'd have a word for it. you asked him to let you find out. and you breathed him in, slow, with his actual shape pressed against you in the nest, and what you found was. old water. warm stone. a faintly mineral scent, faintly clean, like a deep cave that's never known erosion. not unpleasant. it was, in fact, the most comforting smell you'd ever encountered. you told him so, and he held too still and you understood that no one had ever told him what he smelled like before.

exploring you. he's fascinated by your body. in a student of you way, the way an archaeologist is fascinated by something rare and beautiful and theirs to study slowly.

he'll spend literal hours on a single part of you. an evening can be him just at one breast. slow lapping, soft sucking, the careful drag of his teeth, the hot, wet suction of his mouth around your nipple. for what feels like forever, until you're arching and pleading, soaking through the blanket.

and then he'll pull back with this small considering hm, like he's filed something away, and move to the other breast with even more hunger, and start over. he can do this for an entire night. he has done this for an entire night. he calls it gettin' to know you better, baby.

you're not just a body to him. you're a territory. he wants to know every inch of it like the back of his hand.

the catalogue of you. related to the above: he is, somewhere in his ancient and patient mind, cataloguing the things he learns. the spot on your neck that makes you whimper. the angle of pressure on your hip that makes you melt. the exact stroke speed that builds you slowest. the words that work on which days. he updates the list constantly. he's the best lover you'll ever have for the simple reason that he's been studying you, specifically, with the full force of his attention.

you reaching for him first. god, this one. when you are the one to close the distance. when you set down your book and crawl into his lap unprompted, or turn into him in the dark and pull his hand to your throat without saying anything.

when you cup his jaw and pull his mouth down to yours. everything in him lights up in a way he can't hide. the harmonic in his chest jumps half an octave. his pupils blow. he's spent so long being the one to want, the one to ask, the one who has to be gentle about how much he wants.

the moments where you want him first, act on it without prompting, where you simply take, those moments are gifts. he goes pliant under your hands. he lets you set the pace. he'll give you anything you want when you are the one reaching.

your mouth on him. when you press him back against the pillows and trail your mouth down his chest. suck a mark into the soft place under his jaw. when you take his hand and kiss each fingertip tenderly.

when you go down on him. which you don't do often, because he tends to lose composure and pull you up and put you under him within a minute, but the minute you get he's wrecked.

it's the reverse of his exploration kink. he's spent so long being the explorer, the one whose mouth and hands move over you, that the rare reversal undoes him.

he'll let you do anything to him. lie pliant under you and watch you with eyes gone glossy and dark and the harmonic in his chest will pour out shaky and greedy. afterward he'll hold you like you've given him something no one else's ever offered him. which you have.

the small things. related to the above and deserving its own bullet because of how easy it is to set him off. he is (for an ancient eldritch predator) an incredibly responsive lover.

things that should not, by rights, do anything to a creature of his power: you sucking softly on his lower lip during a kiss, the kind of slow pulling kiss you'd give a boyfriend on the couch. you setting your teeth gently to the side of his neck. you mouthing at his pulse point (he doesn't have one but the architecture suggests one and he feels it when you go for the place).

you sucking on the soft pad of his thumb when he traces your lip with it. any of these and the harmonic in his chest purrs out unrestrained and his body coils around you. the not-quite-right way. arms longer than they were a second ago, the line of him pouring closer. every part of him drawn to the point of contact like iron to a magnet. it's so easy.

you have, on countless occasions, completely derailed a casual evening just by leaning over and sucking on his lip for three seconds. he likes that you know this. he likes that you use it. the easiness of his responsiveness is, on his end, a deliberate choice. he doesn't have to react this readily, his body is not naturally arranged this way, he's just decided that around you he wants every small touch to count.

wants you to feel the effect of yourself on him constantly, wants there to be no ambiguity ever about what you do to him. the smallest gestures get full responses. that is on purpose.

your warmth. you feel so warm to him. this is a phrase he's actually said. it's not poetry. it's a literal sensory fact.

he runs cool by default, the air in this place runs cool, the entities he's spent his existence around are cool. and you're a steady human furnace, you radiate heat. constantly. without effort. just by being alive.

when he holds you, when you press into him, when he's inside you and your inner walls are pulsing softly around him, the heat of you is a sensory experience he has nothing to compare to. he runs his hands over your skin sometimes just to feel it. he presses his face into your throat just to feel the warmth radiating off your pulse. he'll spend a long time, in the after, with his palm splayed flat over the warm soft skin of your belly, just feeling you be warm.

he learned to warm by touching you, learned his own body could do that by being near yours, and the response now is automatic. you're the source. you're why he can be warm at all.

you warming him on purpose. you've figured out that you can do this. you can walk up to him cool-skinned in the middle of an ordinary afternoon and put your palm flat to his chest under the flannel and just hold it there. you watch the warmth bloom under your hand.

you can press into him in bed when he's cool from having been still and feel him heat up against your stomach in slow degrees. can take his cold hand in both of yours and breathe on it and watch the harmonic shudder out of him as the heat catches.

this is yours. only you can do it. nothing else in his existence makes him warm. when you do it deliberately, when you're clearly choosing to warm him, the look on his face is gentle, wanting. awe of a thing that's been cold for unimaginably long being deliberately made warm by a creature small enough to hold in his arms.

you watching for the tells. the temperature, the eyes — the fact that you read him by them. he loves being read. when you cup his jaw to check the colour of his eyes after he's been quiet, or put your hand on his throat to feel for the harmonic.

when you press your forehead to his and pause to feel the warmth. they're small, private gestures. they're languages only the two of you speak.

he'd assumed, when he built this body, that he would have to learn human ways of telling you what he was feeling. words, expressions, the usual signals. he didn't expect to find that you would learn to read his actual self instead. that you would meet him at the level his body actually communicates. it's one of the deepest gifts you've given him without realising it was a gift.

caretaking. dressing you after. brushing your hair after. running you a bath after. cleaning the marks he asked permission to leave. tucking the blanket around you. bringing you water before you ask. he's built half the rooms in this place specifically to facilitate aftercare. the act ends when you're clean and warm and held, not when he comes.

kinks (yours, which he learned)

being told you're his. mine in his rough drawl, said low into your throat. he figured this out maybe a week in and has weaponised it ever since.

being held still. the not-quite-human strength of his grip when he pins your hips in place. you didn't know this was a thing you liked until he did it (jut pinned you and made you take him) and you came so hard you nearly sobbed. he files this kind of information away meticulously.

being watched. not in the original sense, in the actual kink sense. this one has an origin story.

you were in the Poolrooms when other entities stumbled onto the two of you in a moment that was not meant to be public. you were on the warm tile and he was over you and you had just started something slow and unhurried when you both felt them. three or four of them, hovering at the far end of the corridor, watching.

BB started to pull back, to cover you, the old protective instinct kicking in with a snarl, but you caught his wrist. you held his eyes. you said, quiet but absolutely certain: let them see. and the look on his face (the blue going dark at the edges, stunned, delighted) was a thing you wanted to keep forever.

he kept going. slowly. thoroughly. let them see exactly what he was doing to you and exactly how you were taking it. let them hear every sound. you came harder than you had in weeks and he understood, then, that this was a thing about you, a real thing about you, and he's been incorporating it carefully ever since.

now, he has (on occasion) manifested an audience in private rooms. lets you choose if you want the watchers to be real or shapes that look like watchers but aren't. you've tried both. the real ones are rare and require specific conditions (he's extremely particular about who gets to look at you). the manifested ones happen more often. the shapes sometimes shifts in the middle of things and you become aware of eyes, vague at the edges of the room, and you know without asking that he's made them for you.

dirty talk in the warm drawl. the voice is one of the few parts of the Bobby-shape you both actually love unreservedly. the warm Cali 90s drawl, lazy and amused. the way he stretches vowels. the contrast between that voice and the obscene things he's saying with it does something to you and he knows. come on, baby, that's it, look at you takin' it so pretty for me (spoken in that exact lazy timbre) has reduced you to incoherence on multiple occasions. he keeps the voice even when the rest of the shape is slipping, because he's noticed what it does to you.

the warming response. the way he goes from cool to warm under your hands. you didn't fully understand at first. early on you assumed he just was warm, the way humans are warm, and only later figured out that the warmth was because of you.

that you walking up and putting a hand on his arm was what turned the heat on. now you know. now you do it on purpose. you press your palm flat to his chest just to feel him warm up under it. you kiss him unhurriedly specifically to watch the temperature climb.

you have, on cold nights, slid your cold hands up under his shirt to put them against the cool plane of his stomach, and felt the slow startled bloom of warmth as your touch registered. felt his humming catch and then purr as his body did what it does, and stayed very still and let you steal the heat back as fast as he made it. it's one of the most intimate things you do with him and barely counts as foreplay. it's evidence. proof that he's alive to you in a way he's not alive to anything else.

reading him. related and important. the temperature and the eyes are not just sensory facts, they're how you communicate.

he doesn't always have the words for what he's feeling. he was not built with the kind of expressive language humans have for emotion. but his body tells you. the cool-to-warm gradient on his skin under your hand. the creep of black at the edge of the blue. the pitch of the harmonic in his chest. you've learned to read these the way you'd learn to read a beloved second language.

you check his eyes when he comes in the door. you put your hand flat to his chest when he's been quiet. you know how he's doing without him having to tell you.

he likes this. he likes being legible to you. he's spent so long being unreadable to everything around him that the experience of being known by his body, without effort, by someone who pays attention, that's love to him.

watching the eyes during sex. specific. when he's over you and moving in you and the slow build of him toward losing the shape is happening (when the blue is eating at the edges with black, the dark creeping inward) you keep your eyes on his eyes.

you watch it happen. you watch the colour go from blue to bloom-darkening-blue to mostly-black to gone, until what's looking down at you is something with no white in its eyes, only deep glossy ink, and the rest of his face is starting to follow. you have come, more than once, from nothing but watching that progression. just the seeing of it. the visual confirmation that you're doing this to him.

that his composure is coming apart because of you, that he's letting you see it. you come watching his eyes go and he watches you come and his eyes finish going and the loop completes.

his warmth. the warmth as a gift. cold things stay cold. cold things radiate cold. he was cold when you met him (you didn't know it then, because he was being careful, but the body he held you against in the early days was cool, and you only realised later, in retrospect, that he had been working very hard to seem human-warm). he's warm with you now because being with you warms him. every time you touch him and he heats under your hand, that is an answer. that's him saying yes, this, more of this, you, you, you with his entire body.

the threading. see above. you didn't know you needed to be full of him in two places at once until he did it and now your body remembers and asks for it without your permission.

how he feels pleasure

his pleasure is not located the way yours is. he doesn't have nerve endings the way you do. he doesn't have a hard cutoff point where sensation crests and then he's done. the body he built has all the equipment that would make pleasure happen for a human partner, and the equipment does work, but it works differently on his end.

his pleasure is mostly relational. what feels good to him is, almost entirely, your pleasure. when you arch under him, when you whimper his name, when the seven hum bright and you clench around him and you sob more into his throat—that's what feels good to him. it's not vicarious enjoyment, exactly. it's more direct than that. he feels your pleasure in his own body, through the seven, and translates it into his own sensation. when you come, he comes, in a sense. he has his own version of the experience, but it is keyed to yours, not independent of it.

the seven are a feedback loop. the seven take his attention and translate it into sensation in your body. you've known that for a while. what you may not have fully understood is that they also work in the other direction. they take your pleasure and feed it back to him.

so when he's making you feel good, you're also making him feel good, through the same mechanism. the loop completes itself. he's the source of your pleasure and also the recipient of it, and the more you feel, the more he feels, and the more he feels, the more he wants to give you, and the more he gives you, the more you feel.

this is why he never wants to stop. ever. the loop is self-sustaining. he could happily make you come for hours (hell, for days, if your body could take it) because the longer he does it the better it feels for him.

there's no point at which he gets bored. no point at which he has finished in the way a human partner might be finished. he's engaged in something that gets better the longer it goes, and the only limit on it is your body. your endurance, your need for water and food and sleep. those limits matter to him enormously. without them he might literally never stop.

he finishes when you do, mostly. this is a choice, not a reflex. he times his own release to yours because he likes the way the seven respond when you come on him (they hum brighter, they pull harder) and his finishing in that moment doubles the resonance. but he can finish at other times. he can finish multiple times in the same encounter, and he can stretch his own pleasure across hours of being inside you without finishing once. the orgasm, for him, is one note in a longer piece, not the resolution.

the warmest sound he makes is that low harmonic, the purr-rumble, the one that vibrates through your sternum when he's happy. it's his version of the good sound. it pours out of him when you're warm against him, when you're full of him and content. it's not a sex sound, exactly. more so contentment sound. it happens at sex and also when you're reading next to him or have fallen asleep with your head on his thigh. he is, in a real sense, purring the way a vast and ancient cat would purr, and the sound means yes, this, more of this, forever.

what you feel like to him. he has tried to describe it and the descriptions never quite fit. the closest he has come: warm. bright. humming. you feel to him the way a fire feels to a thing that's been cold for an unimaginably long time. intense, almost overwhelming with how alive you are.

your body radiates life in a way nothing else in this place does. the heat of you, the pulse of you, the soft give of your skin, the constant gentle electrical hum of a human nervous system doing what nervous systems do. all of it together is, to him, the most sensorily rich thing he's ever encountered. being inside you is being inside that, surrounded by it, part of it. the seven amplify the experience. he is, when he is in you, more alive than he's ever been. in the sense that he's closer to your kind of life than his ancient distant version of it.

this is why he's so reluctant to withdraw. this is why he stays inside you while you sleep. why he never wants to stop. you're warm and bright and you are life, to him, and he's been cold for so long.

he never wants to stop making you feel good. every single position, kink, and long exploration. nights spent inside you while you sleep, every patient hour of his mouth on you. all of it is in service of the simple unwavering project of making you feel as good as you can possibly feel. for as long as he can sustain it, until the end of time if you'll let him. and you will. you absolutely will.

things he does that no human could do

the contortion thing. yes. yes he does this. his joints don't have to count properly when he isn't bothering. he can bend in ways that let him reach angles a human spine would shatter trying to reach. he can fold himself around you so that every part of you that wants to be touched is being touched simultaneously.

the first time he did this (you on your back, him somehow with one hand on your throat and one between your thighs and his mouth on your breast and the cock still inside you, all at once, with no apparent strain in his posture) you laughed, in pure shock, and BB stopped immediately to check on you and you had to explain you were happy.

the matched rhythm. he can sync the thrust of his hips, the curl of his tongue, the press of his thumb on your clit, and the pulse of the seven inside you to one single rhythm. all five points of contact. all on the same beat. there's no human word for what this does to your nervous system. it's like being played as an instrument.

gravity-defying things. he can hold you against a wall with no apparent support from below. he can carry you mid-act and the position doesn't break. he can fuck you while you are essentially levitating in his arms with your legs around his waist and never once does he need to set you down. you've stopped questioning how this works. it just works.

temperature override. he can stay cool even when you're under him panting, hold his body at that stone-shade baseline through everything you're doing to him. this takes effort and he rarely bothers. the only times he uses it: in hot levels when you want the contrast, or the rare moments when you ask for cold, and the cock slides into you ice-cool and your whole spine arches off the bed. he can also push the other direction. go hotter than emotion alone would take him, fever-hot in a deliberate way, but he does this even less, because the natural warming is, to him, more honest .

internal vibration. the cock can vibrate, at a frequency. when he's buried deep and not moving and the cock starts vibrating steadily against your inner walls. the sensation is so unfair it almost feels like cheating. he uses this one sparingly because if he used it often you would never get out of bed.

the splitting thing. now. you've asked him about this only once, and the answer terrified and intrigued you in equal measure. he can produce more than one of himself, temporarily due to strain, for the duration of an act. two BBs, fully formed, both him, both aware, both wanting you. it's not duplication so much as distribution. you've not asked for it. you might. you might never. the option exists.

favourite parts of you (his)

the seven, obviously. but you knew that.

the soft place at the small of your back. he can't leave it alone. his hand finds it whenever you are near him. when you're standing, when walking. you're lying on your stomach with the blanket pushed down. he traces circles into it without thinking. when he's inside you from behind his palm rests there like an anchor.

the hollow of your throat. where your pulse hammers. he's fascinated by the hammer of you. by the visible proof that you're alive and the heart is doing what hearts do. he kisses you there constantly. he sets his teeth into the place gently and feels the pulse against his tongue and the blue of his eyes goes dark at the edges every time.

your hands. specifically the backs of them. he holds your hand constantly, when you're walking, when you're sitting, when he's inside you and you're lying together after. he traces the bones of your knuckles. he kisses each finger separately sometimes. he's endlessly delighted by the fact that you have hands and that they hold onto him.

the sound you make when you wake up. the quiet, involuntary one before you open your eyes. he'll lie awake for hours waiting for it. it is, he's told you, the best sound in any world.

the place behind your ear. where your hair is fine. he buries his face there constantly. he says you smell like the only home he's ever wanted.

the final note (the underneath)

everything about the sex (the contortion, the stamina, the impossible mechanics, the seven, the breeding chemistry, every freaky impossible thing) is in service of a very simple project, which is keeping you happy.

he's not actually a freak. so much as an ancient thing that's been alone for a very long time and that fell in love with a lonely human at a furniture store and has been, ever since, trying to give her every good thing he can build. the kinks are just the shapes the love took when it had nowhere else to go.

he would be just as happy holding you fully clothed on the couch for hours as he is doing any of the above. truly. he has told you this. you believe him.

but he's also a thing of vast appetite and watching you come apart under his hands is, genuinely, one of the great pleasures of his existence. so when you ask him for the freaky things, he gives you the freaky things.

the love and the freak are not separate. the love is the freak. the freak is the love. there's no version of him that wants you politely. you got the entity. you got all of it.

He sits on the worn leather sofa in the fraternity common room, a lukewarm coffee in hand, watching a pair of freshmen argue over a video game. Last year, this room was a minefield of budget crises, noise complaints from the dean, and brotherhood disputes that required the diplomacy of a UN peacekeeper.

Now? His biggest administrative headache is convincing a nineteen-year-old sophomore that failing Intro to Macroeconomics will directly result in a ban on the upcoming Halloween celebrations.

It’s a glorious, low-stakes existence, and Jack intends to ride this wave of absolute mediocrity straight through to May.

His only other role in the frat this year is party-planning, and Jack has no problem dedicating time to that.

Tonight's festivities - their annual Hippies vs. Cowboys party. A legendary night that requires him to dust off his old presidential authority to keep the drinks flowing and spirits high.

Planning it is always an exercise in absurdity. Jack spends the week leading up to the party negotiating borders in the backyard, dividing the lawn into a "Saloon" and a "Commune." He has to veto the freshmen's increasingly dangerous ideas for a homemade mechanical bull, while simultaneously confiscating suspicious bundles of sage that the "hippies" want to burn inside a house with centuries-old wooden beams.

Everything is set up. Now, his only concern is trying to salvage the guestlist when Robby decides he’s not coming out of the blue.

"Come on, man, it’s Hippies and Cowboys," Jack argues, propping his phone against the mirror. "You can literally just wear some denim. I have an extra hat. It takes zero effort."

On the screen, Robby looks thoroughly exhausted, surrounded by thick textbooks and empty coffee cups. "I'm in med school, Jack. My brain is leaking out of my ears. You’ll understand next year."

As one of the only academically-inclined members of the team, he and Robby had become fast-friends in Jack’s first year, when Robby was a senior. Now an MS3, he’s been a life-saver when it comes to applying to med school.

"Which is exactly why you need to get drunk in a basement. Savour this before you’re pulling fourteen hour shifts every day.”

"I am not traveling all the way up from the medical campus just to watch a bunch of freshmen pass out on a mechanical bull," Robby groans, rubbing his temples. "The commute alone will kill me, and I start my Psych rotation at dawn. Go have a beer for me.”

“Loser,” Jack hollers.

“Whatever. Try not to torment the female population of Cornell tonight, and I’ll see you at the first game.”

*****

The bass from the speakers downstairs is already vibrating through the floorboards when the front door officially opens. Within an hour, the house is packed to capacity, a sweaty, high-energy blur of denim, suede, flower crowns, and flannel.

Jack takes his role as host seriously. He moves through the crowded living room with easy, senior-year confidence, high-fiving guys from the lacrosse team, directing people toward the kegs, and making sure the hired DJ actually keeps the crowd moving. He plays the part perfectly, laughing at jokes, keeping the peace, and flirting where necessary.

He may also be looking for someone to hook up with.

He argues that it’s only natural. First week of the semester, you’ve got to start how you intend to go on. And Jack intends to have fun. Unattached, zero strings fun.

When Chloe walks in, it feels a little like a sign.

A Communications major, they’ve been hooking up on-and-off since sophomore year. She catches his eye, gives him a slow, familiar smile, and begins to make her way through the crowds.

Normally, Jack would meet her halfway. Tonight, though, he just isn't feeling it.

The thought of going through the usual routine - the standard small talk, the familiar rhythm - suddenly feels entirely unappealing. He gives her a friendly, casual wave instead of a come-hither look, deliberately stepping into a conversation with a group of hockey freshmen to break her line of sight. He needs something different tonight. He just doesn't know what it is yet.

He’s lamenting his lack of options, when one literally falls into his lap. There’s a slight commotion that he’s not paying attention to, before you’re pushed, stumbling slightly before hitting the side of his legs and losing your balance entirely.

If Jack is expecting some kind of slowing of time, prolonged eye contact and shy smiles, he doesn’t get any of it. Instead, you toss him a brief apology, before you’re back on your feet to yell at the guy who pushed you. “What the fuck is wrong with you?”

Normally, Jack makes it a rule to not get involved with fraternity drama. One of the more sober brothers can deal with it. But something about you has him getting to his feet, arms crossed as he situates himself between you and your assailant. He glances at the guy, vaguely recognises him as someone who’s caused trouble before.

Doesn’t tend to understand the word no.

“Is there a problem here?”

“I told him I wasn’t interested, and he fucking shoved me!”

That’s all Jack needs to hear. For all the issues that Sigma Chi may have, they certainly don’t allow creeps on their premises. All it takes is one rumour of the frat not shutting it down properly, and they can kiss their squeaky-clean reputation goodbye. “Right, you’re done,” He starts, a hand on the guy’s chest as he waves for security by the front door.

“What?” When the guy speaks, his voice is slurred, his cheeks flushed. He’s totally wasted, to the point where it’s a miracle he’s even standing upright. “S-She came on t’me.”

“I’m positive that’s not true,” Jack replies, taking one look at him. Unkempt hair, noticeable body odour, and a shitty attitude. You could definitely do better. “What’s your name?”

“Why d’ya w-want t’know?”

“We’re offering you an award,” Jack replies dryly. “Because I’m banning you from the house, dumbass.”

The guy goes to reply, tries to make a half-hearted swing at Jack, when security take an arm each, and begin to haul him out backwards.

“Check his ID, and give me his name at the end of the night!” Jack calls after him, before turning his attention back to you.

You don’t look scared, or distressed, or even annoyed. Instead, you look almost amused by the entire situation.

“Jack,” He offers you his hand, and you tell him your own name. He tries it out, likes the way it sounds on his tongue. “You want a drink?”

You’re nodding, and he’s leading you through to the kitchen to grab a beer. Your nose scrunches a little as you take it. “What - you don’t like beer?”

Which is how, for the first time in his college career, Jack finds himself mixing up a margarita in the middle of a frat party. You’d insisted you’d be fine with some vodka and coke, but he finds himself wanting to impress you.

“So… was your inspiration Manson-Family-Chic?” He asks, raising an eyebrow while you snort, into your cup. He doesn’t know why he’s ragging on you, given you’re one of the only people here who looks like they could’ve fallen out of the sixties. The neckline of your dress is high, leaving everything to the imagination, but the hem falls high on your thighs, to the point where one wrong move would have everything on display.

Most other guests took the hippie theme to mean lingerie with some over-sized glasses and a peace-sign necklace.

He likes that you took it seriously.

The way he checks you out is far from subtle, hazel eyes trailing down your form, all the way down to your white go-go boots.

“Do you know what the Manson Family were wearing on a day-to-day basis? Because it certainly wasn’t vintage Biba.”

Somebody bumps into you from behind, and Jack takes the opportunity to hook an arm around your waist and pull you into him for the second time that night. Now chest-to-chest, you’re looking up at him through darkly-lined eyes, and he suddenly doesn’t know what to say.

“Does the white knight thing normally work for you?”

He lets out a laugh, low and genuine. “It’s never hurt.”

Over the next few minutes, Jack learns more about you than he knows about some of his own teammates. You’re on the pre-law track, but because you were such an ‘annoying overachiever’ in high school, your plan is to chill for the rest of college. You also play bass and sing back-up in a band, but were supremely embarrassed by any kind of suggestion that you might sing for him sometime.

“So… you’re what - some kind of rockstar?” He asks, obviously out to charm, and you snort.

“Definitely not as sexy as that. Bassists don’t normally get that much love.”

“I don’t know, sounds pretty sexy to me,” His head is dipped, his nose almost touching yours. “Hot girl, guitar… pretty sure I had wet dreams exactly like that in high school.”

You laugh before you can help it, the sound getting swallowed by the music and the noise of the party around you.

“Oh my God,” you mutter, shaking your head.

“Too much?”

You glance up at him, trying to decide your answer, when the music shifts, and the opening chords of Layla waft through the frat house. He watches your face visibly light up, and bites back a smile.

“Clapton fan?” he asks.

“Let me guess - you’re in charge of the music tonight.”

“Unfortunately, the rest of the team think that the nineties counts as retro. Do you dance?”

“You asking?”

“Maybe,” He shrugs.

You narrow your eyes playfully. “You any good?”

“Absolutely not.”

“Perfect.”

Before he can react, you grab his wrist and tug him toward the centre of the room.

Jack doesn’t miss a beat. He uses your grip on his wrist to pull you flush against him, completely eliminating the space between you. His large, calloused palm settles firmly against the small of your back, guiding you into a breathless rhythm.

You look up, completely caught in his orbit as he spins you out and pulls you right back against his chest. At this distance, the rest of the frat house completely blurs out. Jack dips his head, lips brushing your neck in the briefest kiss.

Layla, you've got me on my knees.

The lyrics echo in his head, and for the first time in his life, they don't feel like hyperbole. If Clapton hadn't written it fifty years ago, Jack is pretty sure someone would have to write it about you tonight.

Begging darling please, Layla

He catches Chloe’s eye as his hands drop to your waist, and he immediately glances away.

They're not dating. They have zero obligations to one another.

So why does she look so pissed?

Darling, won't you ease my worried mind?

The guitar solo is screaming through the speakers, matching the frantic, heavy rhythm in Jack's chest. He looks down at your mouth, then back up to your eyes, and realises he is completely text-book losing his mind. A freshman bumps hard into his shoulder, but he barely registers it. He is entirely done with this crowded room, done sharing the way you move and the sweet smell of your perfume with a hundred drunk strangers.

Pulling you into him, he lowers his head until his lips brush the warm skin just below your ear. “Come upstairs with me,” he murmurs, his voice tight with an impatience he doesn't even bother trying to hide.

He doesn't offer a lame excuse. He just pulls back to look down at you, waiting.

Instead of answering, you slide your hand up his neck, tilt your chin, and press your lips directly to his.

Jack lets out a quiet, defeated breath against you, his hands instantly sliding up your back to anchor you against him. The kiss is intoxicating, tasting like the drink on your breath and the heat of the room, completely shattering his usual composure.

When you finally break apart, both of you breathing a little harder, you finally slide your hand down into his open palm and squeeze it gently. “Lead the way, hockey boy.”

*****

You catch the back of his neck and pull him into you, allowing him to walk you backwards until the back of your legs hit the bed.

Jack's been known to rip some clothing in his time, but he takes surprising care with your dress. As soon as it’s draped over the back of his chair, the rest of your clothes go in a frenzied rush. The dancing was the foreplay, and neither of you can stand a single second more of not being as close as possible.

There's a layer of sweat covering Jack's skin, glittering under the light from the lamp on his bedside, and you allow yourself a second to admire his abs.

He catches you looking, and a familiar, cocky smirk tugs at the corner of his mouth. He follows you down onto the mattress, his weight a warm, welcome pressure that drives every remaining thought of the noisy fraternity house right out of your head. His hands are surprisingly gentle as they frame your face, fingers tangling in your hair while his mouth finds yours again.

“You up for this?” He breathes, and you find yourself oddly charmed. He checked on you twice on the way up here - and while, sure, it’s the bare minimum, it’s not something you’re hugely used to.

“I wouldn’t have let you bring me up here if I wasn’t,” You mumble back, between kisses, anticipation in your chest tripling as he reaches for a condom.

You're not usually one to be bossed around, but there's something intoxicating about the way Jack manhandles you. A few small giggles escape as he flips you onto your front, pulling your ass back to meet his hips.

“Something funny?”

“I guess that depends on your performance.”

“You’re a tough critic. Noted.”

With that, he’s sinking in, and your fingers grip helplessly at his sheets as you try and ground yourself. “Shit.”

You’d rather die than tell him, but he’s big. Thicker and longer than your ex.

“Doing okay down there?” You can hear the smirk in his voice, and realise he knows exactly what you’re thinking.

“Just fine.”

He starts to move, movements slow at first as his hands settle at your hips, gripping tightly. The stretch soon gives way to pleasure, and you’re more than a little embarrassed when you whimper.

You don’t whimper.

Not at all.

Except tonight, it seems.

Must be the alcohol.

“J-Jack, oh my god-”

An arm loops around your front, pulling you upwards until your back is pressed to his chest. With it, the angle changes, and you can feel your eyes roll to the back of your head.

“Good girl,” is groaned right into your ear, and you think you might be seeing stars.

Maybe hockey players do know what they're doing.

You're suddenly very glad for the blaring music downstairs drowning out the sound of skin slapping, and the way Jack is moaning behind you. If you weren't close before, his hand dropping between your legs to circle at your clit throws you over the edge.

You tilt your head upwards, catching his lips in a sloppy kiss as he works you through the orgasm.

Normally, this would be it. A brief kiss pressed to your shoulder, before your ex curled up in bed and left you hanging.

Jack, however, appears to have exactly the stamina you'd expect from a varsity jock, and you’re on your back before you can even orient yourself. His face is buried in the crook of your neck as his thrusts resume.

Nails digging in to the meat of his back, your mind is totally cleared of anything that isn’t Jack’s name. You don’t even know his surname.

You wouldn't have pegged him for an eye contact guy, but as his movements become more erratic, he’s pulling back to hold your jaw, keeping your gaze fixed on him.

“F-Fuck, I think I’m gonna-” With a final groan, he climaxes, dropping his head to rest against yours while his hips start to slow. “Holy shit.”

“Yeah,” You breathe. “Holy shit.”

“You okay?”

You nod quickly, lip between your teeth. The last thing you want to do is give him an even bigger head than he already has, but it slips out before you can stop it. “I’ve never cum that quickly before.”

“What can I say? I’m a pro,” He replies, a lazy grin on his face as he presses one last kiss to your temple before he pulls out, and gets to his feet to reach for the trash can.

Condom discarded, he pads back over to the bed, his shoulders so broad that he takes up half the space.

“Are you one of those guys that can't have girls stay over?” You ask, chest still heaving a little as you try and regain your senses.

“M'not gonna kick you out at-” He checks his phone. “3am. What kind of a monster do you think I am?”

“Well, you are on the hockey team,” You start, trailing off in a fit of giggles when Jack digs his fingers into your side, tickling mercilessly. “Hey!”

“I've got practice in the morning, though. So I'll be out at like six.”

You understand what he's getting at. Jack is not in the relationship business.

You don't have a problem with that. You wanted some variety in your life, and you got it. “S'okay. It was good sex. No point in trying to make it something it isn't.”

“You're my kind of girl, princess. You ever thought about coming to the hockey games?”

You snort, shooting him a glance. “Are you trying to recruit me to the Puck Bunny leagues? Yeah, I think I'll pass on that one, thanks.”

“Oh, come on,” Jack groans, throwing a heavy arm over his eyes, though a smug little smirk still tugs at his lips. “It’s peak entertainment.”

“And you’ll have CTE by the time you’re twenty-five.”

“Technically, I’m more likely to lose teeth. If we’re talking statistics.”

You scrunch up your nose. “Gross.”

“Besides,” He continues. “This is my last year playing. I’m going to med school next year.”

“Really?” You gape, turning onto your side to get a better look at him. He’d told you earlier he was a biology major, but you hadn’t given it much thought. You’d figured he was probably just trying to avoid as many essays as possible.

“You don’t have to sound so surprised,” He grumbles.

“I’m just keeping your feet on the ground, hockey boy. Someone’s gotta do it. Good for you, though - I thought hockey players lost all their braincells from the fights.”

“Going to sleep now,” Jack singsongs, shoving lightly at your shoulder, and you laugh again.

You slide down into the mattress, turning your back to him and pulling the blanket tight around your shoulders. You expect him to stay on his side, but after a minute, the mattress shifts. Jack moves closer, his chest pressing against your back, his large frame bracketing yours to block out the chill of the room. He doesn't say anything, and neither do you. His arm slides carefully around your waist, holding you still, and despite the biting comments, you let yourself sink backward into his warmth as you both drift off.

he goes down without resistance. he always does for you. he lets you tip him backward onto the blankets—the fabric sighing under his weight, the nest reshaping itself around him—lets you settle him onto his back like he's furniture you're rearranging. his eyes are wide and curious, a little startled because you don't usually move him.

you climb on top of him.

you don't look at his face. you can't. the lights are too bright and your skin is too tight and you can't articulate a single human thought right now. you just push your hands up under the bottom of his hoodie, under his shirt, shoving the fabric up around his ribs. your knuckles drag across his stomach, the skin smooth and cool like river stone, and then you duck your head and crawl under the hem.

it's dark under there.

it's quiet under there.

bb's stomach is cool against your cheek. the cotton of his hoodie is a small dim tent over your head, soft against the back of your neck, and the harsh lights are gone. completely gone. blocked out by the fabric, and you exhale for the first time all day.

your whole body unclenches. you press your face against the smooth wrong-temperature skin of his torso and listen to the absence of his heartbeat and feel the low hum vibrating through his sternum, through his ribs. press closer to the cool, flat plane of his stomach where your cheek rests.

you can smell him. damp cotton, and underneath that, mineral and ancient scent. like stone that's been underground for a very long time. it should be unsettling. yet somehow it's the most comforting thing in the world.

you close your eyes.

shh.

bb has gone completely, utterly still.

you remember, vaguely, somewhere in the back of your tired exhausted brain real bobby. before everything went wrong.

lying in bed with him on a sunday afternoon, the light coming through his bedroom window warm and golden, and joking i want to be so close to you i'm basically in your ribcage and bobby laughing and saying babe that's weird and pulling you into his arms, burying his face in your hair.

he'd held you like that for a while. you could hear his heartbeat, real and steady and human, and his skin was warm. he smelled like skin, cheap soap and even cheaper cologne he'd worn since sophomore year, and you'd thought this. this is all i need.

he would have let you stay there. he did let you stay there. he was really good once. he just couldn't sustain it. the arms would loosen. the attention would drift. he'd reach for his pager with one hand while the other went slack against your back and you'd feel the moment he left even though his body was still there.

bb is not leaving.

his hands are hovering somewhere above you. you can feel the space where they should be, the cool absence of contact, the careful displacement of air. and you can sense him not knowing what to do. processing. trying to figure out the protocol for the love of his existence has just burrowed under his clothes and pressed her face against his stomach and is making a small, contented noises.

then, slowly, gently, his hands settle.

palm flat against your back through the layers of his hoodie. the weight of his hand steady and deliberate, fingers spread wide, covering as much of you as he can reach. the other curls around the back of your head, holding you to him, fingers threading at the nape of your neck where the tension lives.

the humming starts.

not in his throat. in his chest. you feel it everywhere your skin touches his. that low constant vibration, the resonance that means safe, mine, stay. and it's so much closer like this, so much louder. you're inside it now. you've crawled into the source. it moves through bb's ribs and into your cheekbone and down through your jaw, settling in your chest.

your breathing syncs to it without your permission. your body trusting him before your brain can object.

he understands. he doesn't say anything but he understands.

somewhere in his unknowable processing he's connecting this to every joke you've ever made, every offhand comment about wanting to be closer. every small, impossible wish you've voiced to other people who couldn't give it to you. he's filing this moment in whatever he has instead of memory and labelling it she chose me. she crawled into me. she came home.

bb's hand strokes unhurriedly down your back through the hoodie. up. down. his fingers find the knots along your spine and press (not hard, just enough, just exactly enough) and the tension you've been carrying between your shoulder blades releases in a way that makes your breath stutter.

you press closer. your arm curls around his side, fingers finding the ridge of his lower ribs. too prominent, the set up slightly wrong, the bones just a fraction too defined under the skin, and you hold on.

the hum deepens.

you fall asleep there.

in the dark. against his bare skin. under his clothes. inside the warm cotton tent that smells like cold stone and uniquely him.

the lights stop bothering you because you can't see them anymore. the migraine ebbs. your breathing slows and matches the rhythm of his impossible non-breath. you can feel his chest rise and fall—performing it, mirroring your rhythm, breathing because you're breathing, syncing himself to you the way he syncs everything to you.

bb doesn't move for the rest of the day.

he could. he doesn't.

he stays exactly where he is. one hand on your back. one in your hair. humming his tuneless song into the dark space where you've made yourself small against him. and somewhere in level 0, the fluorescent lights dim by a degree, then another, then another. soft, dim, gentle. because his girl is sleeping and the harshness was hurting her and he's the walls, the carpet, the lights and he'll simply make them stop.

rib time.

shh.

and you'd just. accept mr kitty. immediately. "oh hello" and move on. a giant, faceless black humanoid with no features and you wouldn't even flinch. and THAT'S the thing that would really get to bb.

not the cookies. or the couch. the fact that you'd reach out and touch mr kitty's arm without hesitating. without the half-second pause you still sometimes have with bb where your survival brain runs its checks before your heart overrides them. you'd just. touch him. casually. the way you'd touch a friend.

and bb would be standing there going through the most complex emotional experience of his ancient existence because on one hand: mine mine mine mine she's mine the cookie is not better than me i restructured level 0 for her i killed for her i learned the word baby for her and this FACELESS PASTRY CHEF gets a smile for FREE???

but on the other hand. on the quieter hand. the hand that thinks in longer timeframes.

you accepted something inhuman without blinking. again. not because it wore a familiar face. not because it looked like bobby. because it was gentle with you and that was enough. and if you can look at mr kitty (no face, no voice, no borrowed features, just dark and strange and kind) and reach out and touch without flinching... then your acceptance of bb was never about the face. it was never about bobby's template. it was about you. about who you are. about the fact that you are simply, deep down, a person who looks at inhuman things and sees someone worth being soft with.

which means you might have loved him without the face.

which means the face might have been unnecessary.

which means everything he built (the bobby suit, the smile, the voice, the careful meticulous replication of a boy from santa clara) might not have been what caught you at all. it might have just been. him. the cold and the dark and the hum and whatever he actually is underneath all of it.

and that realisation is so big and so complicated that bb would need to go stand in a hallway by himself for a minute. just to process. just to let the implications settle without showing something.

but yeah, he'd still be jealous of that cookie. absolutely. you don't spend centuries as the most powerful thing in the backrooms only to be outperformed by a pastry.

he'd hold a grudge about that specific cookie for weeks. he'd find ways to source you sweet things on other levels (not as good, slightly weird, backrooms approximations of treats that taste almost right), and present them to you with that half-lidded expectant look like see? i can do that too. i can give you sweet things. please make the sound. the happy sound. the one you made for the cookie. make it for me.

just... holds it out. wrist up. watching your face with that half-lidded attention, that laser focus. there's a held breath. not his, he doesn't need to breathe, but he's performing one anyway. that tiny suspension of his performed respiratory cycle that means he's waiting to see what you'll do. anticipating.

you bite his forearm. gently. a little scrape of teeth against the too-cool skin.

the sound bb makes is unreasonable. deep and pleased and rumbling through his whole body. he looks at the little indentations your teeth left on his skin with the same reverence he gave the first hickey. evidence. proof.

you wanted to bite him because you like him. your teeth on his skin because of fondness. claiming. his instincts register it as claiming and every ancient, possessive inch of him lights up.

it becomes a thing after that.

he starts offering himself up. casually. constantly. he'll tilt his head while you're walking and expose the side of his neck. that long line of it, tendons taut, the skin pale and cool. glances at you sideways with that half-lidded look. the held breath. the almost-imperceptible pause in his performed breathing cycle. waiting. just to see.

and you know what he's doing. he's not even subtle about it. he's putting the throat on display because he's figured out that you like the tendons there. you've traced them with your fingers. you've buried your face against his neck a hundred times in the nest. he's learned exactly which parts of him you gravitate toward and he's presenting them like a cat dropping a gift at your feet. here. this is the part you like. i noticed. please, please.

the throat is his favourite. and it's devastating because of what it means. this is an apex predator offering you his most vulnerable point. this is a thing that has killed hounds with its bare hands deliberately exposing the one place where even something as powerful as him could theoretically be hurt. and he does it without thinking. tilts the chin. shows the neck. holds the not-breath.

waits for the munch.

sometimes you oblige. a press of your mouth against the tendon, then a gentle bite, and his whole body responds.

the skin warming under your lips, that flush of almost-human heat that only happens when you touch him, and the breathing he doesn't need stuttering slightly because he's synced his respiratory performance to your proximity and your mouth on his throat is causing some kind of system-wide meltdown.

sometimes you don't, and he accepts it with the same patience he applies to everything involving you. no pressure. just the offer. the tilt. the quiet hope. here, please, more.

but the times you do... the times you lean over in the nest and press your teeth into the soft skin under his jaw and feel the performed breath catch?

the hum stutters and his whole body orients toward you like a compass finding north. you can feel how happy it makes him. not just pleased. not just the feline satisfaction. something deeper. something that registers in the architecture of level 0 itself. the lights going warm, the hum softening. simply because you bit him. because you wanted to. because your human brain looked at this incomprehensible thing and said "cute" and your human teeth said "mine."

he offers the throat and you take it and somewhere in whatever he has instead of a heart he files it alongside "baby" and "mine" and "good boy" and every other small human thing you've given him that he keeps turning over like smooth stones. all his.

he didn't know tenderness could have teeth.

King's Landing smelled exactly as you remembered, salt from Blackwater Bay, smoke from a thousand hearths, fish, sewage, damp stone, and too many people packed too closely together. But beneath it all lingered the sweetness of summer flowers climbing through the terraced gardens, stubbornly blooming above the city's filth as though none of it concerned them.

You had forgotten how overwhelming it was or perhaps distance had simply polished the memory.

The smell hit you the moment the wheelhouse passed through the gates of the Red Keep. Instinctively, you pressed the back of your hand briefly to your nose before deciding that was an undignified gesture for a princess and lowering it again.

Across from you, Aerion glanced up from the letter in his hands. He had been reading the same reports for most of the journey. You suspected this particular letter was on its fourth inspection.

“We can return,” he said, he had been reading and re-reading reports for the last three hours of the journey, as though the words might rearrange themselves into better news if he gave them enough attention.

“We cannot,” you said pleasantly. “You know that.” You shifted against the cushioned seat, or tried to, at nine months along you had, made peace with the fact that your body was no longer entirely your own. The child moved as it liked and your ankles complained regularly. Still, you managed.

The Red Keep rose around you as the wheelhouse came to a stop, and Aerion was already reaching for your arm when the door opened, his hand settled at your elbow, steady and firm.

The days that followed passed in a blur.

Aerion had barely set down his travel cloak before the summons came, Maekar, requesting his presence at the first of what would be many meetings, briefings, discussions that bled from afternoon into evening into the following morning. The rebellion was not yet a rebellion, it was still a rumour with increasingly credible sources, movements of men in the Riverlands, conversations that should not have been had, allegiances tested quietly at the edges, and Maekar intended to deal with the problem before it became a war.

Aerion understood this. He had said so himself, in the brief intervals when he was with you. He understood the urgency; he agreed with his father's decision to act before the situation kept growing.

What he did not seem to understand was how exhausted he looked. You saw it in the mornings first, the dark circles beneath his eyes that had been there when you arrived and deepened with each passing day, staining the skin beneath them to the colour of a bruise. He slept perhaps three hours, perhaps less, and you knew because you felt the absence of him in the bed before you fully woke. By the time you were awake he was already at his writing desk, surrounded by maps and reports, a candle burned to almost nothing beside him.

You saw it in his movements. He was precise by nature, controlled, deliberate, each gesture measured, but under enough exhaustion that precision began to fray. Small things, the way he set down a goblet slightly harder than necessary, the slight tightening around his eyes when someone spoke to him at a volume, he found unnecessary.

His temper had always been a live thing. He had worked, with considerable effort and at considerable cost, to shorten its leash. But a leash under pressure tends to loosen.

You said nothing yet. You watched, and you waited.

You were not present for the council meeting that day. You heard about it afterward, in pieces, from a maid who had it from a steward who had stood outside the doors.

The meeting had begun well, by all accounts.

King Maekar had laid out the intelligence gathered so far, the scale of the rumoured movement, the families implicated, the question of where the rebellion might grow if left unchecked. Several of the older knights had offered assessments, cautious and conservative in the way men became when they had survived enough wars to be suspicious of certainty.

Then Aerion had presented his strategy.

He had prepared thoroughly, you knew this because you had watched him prepare, had seen the maps spread across the table in your chambers at all hours, had woken in the night to find him still working by candlelight, his silver hair loose around his face, his finger tracing routes through the Riverlands with intensity. He had done the work; there was no question of that.

His proposal was bold, decisive, characteristically Aerion. Strike early and disrupt supply routes, force the conspirators into the open before they could unite. But then Ser Duncan the Tall had spoken.

Not loudly, not with any evident desire to undermine, simply in his direct, honest manner. He had identified the flaw. The strategy assumed the rebellion's consolidation point was where intelligence suggested. But intelligence on the ground, Duncan had noted, indicated two separate and apparently uncoordinated movements. Aerion's plan addressed one, but it left the other entirely free to act while attention was directed elsewhere. Worse, it might inadvertently drive the two movements together, forging unity where there had previously been only parallel discontent.

He had offered an alternative, less elegant, but more methodical, requiring patience and a longer timeline. The room had fallen silent, Maekar had considered it and the others followed.

The storm had been building since midday.

You'd watched it from the windows of your chambers as dark clouds crept across the horizon, swallowing the sunlight piece by piece. By the time evening fell there was nothing left of the sky at all, only a low, churning dark pressed against the towers of the Red Keep, and the rain had begun in earnest, wind rattled the shutters hard enough to make them shudder in their frames, and cold drafts slipped beneath the doors.

You had tried to read, after the third time rereading the same page, you gave up.

Nine months pregnant to the day, you had spent the last week adjusting to a new kind of discomfort. The weight of the child seemed lower now, settled deep in your body. Pressure came and went in strange waves, leaving an ache behind that never fully disappeared. The maester assured you it was normal; your body was preparing itself.

That knowledge should have been reassuring, instead, it made everything feel worse. You shifted carefully in your chair and rested a hand on the curve of your stomach. The child moved beneath your palm, slow and heavy.

Aerion had returned from the council chambers in the early evening; he barely moved in over an hour. The flames cast shifting light across his face, catching in his silver hair and painting sharp shadows beneath his cheekbones. He looked carved from stone, one elbow rested against the arm of the chair, fingers curled loosely against his jaw. His eyes remained fixed on the fire.

These days you could read him almost as easily as weather, he had been worse than he had been in a long time. Plans for the rebellion had reached a critical stage. Meetings stretched late into the night. Reports arrived faster than anyone could answer them. Prince Maekar was making decisions Aerion disagreed with, and disagreement sat poorly with him even under ideal circumstances.

You saw it in the tightness around his eyes. In the clipped replies he gave servants who happened to arrive at the wrong moment. In the way his shoulders never seemed to fully relax anymore, as if he expected another problem to appear the instant he looked away.

The problem was that the discipline was running out, you had watched it running out, and had been patient, had given him space, and you had tried in small ways to be steady around him, tried to become one thing in his life that required nothing from him.

“My love,” you said quietly. “What's wrong?”

His gaze stayed on the fire, hard, distant, the flames reflecting in his violet eyes until they seemed almost unreal. You waited and he still said nothing.

“Aerion.”

A thunder cracked, a long, rolling sound that shook the window in its frame, and for the briefest moment, something shifted in his expression, you thought he might answer, a muscle jumped near his temple and he exhaled through his nose.

“Nothing,” he said.

You adjusted yourself in the chair, slow and careful. The movement sent another dull ache through your lower back. One hand settled automatically over your stomach where the pressure had been building all evening. “Don't push me away,” you said. “Talk to me.”

“I said-.”

“I heard what you said.”

Something flashed in his face, the last of the control giving.

“Nothing!”

The word came out sharp and loud and far harsher than anything he had directed at you in a very long time; the rain battered the windows.

You were quiet for a moment.

“I know you're stressed-.”

“You know nothing about stress.” His voice had dropped again, low and venomous. “What would you know about it? You sit here all day, you read and you wait for me to come back and fuck you like a slut every night.”

For a moment neither of you spoke, you looked at him and he was staring at the fire again, jaw tight, breathing fast, and you could see, that he knew. The moment the words had left his mouth, some part of him already knew, the ugly implication behind them.

“You can be an asshole all you want,” you said at last, your voice steady despite the hurt pressing against your ribs. “But I know you don't actually think that about me.”

“Don't act like you know me.” His voice was low, cracking at the edges, just slightly, a fault line beneath the venom. “You don't know what I'm dealing with.”

“Aerion, I'm your wife-.”

“You're carrying my child.” He turned from the fire at last, and his eyes met yours, the fury was still there, so was exhaustion, and underneath both, buried deep enough that most people would have missed it entirely, was fear, raw and desperate. “That doesn't mean I owe you sweetness every second.”

You pushed yourself to your feet.

It was slow, he shifts forward pulled at your lower back, and the familiar ache settled across your hips as you straightened. Still, you rose, because you refused to sit there and let him speak to you like that, you were his wife. You had given him more of yourself than he could possibly understand, and you would not simply absorb his anger because he happened to be carrying too much of his own.

“Aerion.”

You reached for his arm, slowly.

He jerked away, a reflex, already drowning in his own thoughts and he couldn't bear being touched in that moment. He moved his arm and by mistake, a miscalculation, his hand pushed you away.

It didn’t require much force and balance failed you. Your foot slipped on the damp stone. You felt the world tilt, the floor disappearing beneath you. You fell, hard enough on your side to drive the breath from your lungs, enough to send a sharp, frightened sound from your throat before you could stop it, enough to leave you sprawled on the stone floor, one hand pressing flat against stone while the other flew immediately to your stomach.

Then you felt it, the warmth between your thighs, a sudden rush between your thighs, your heart stopped and you lowly looked down, realization hitting you all at once.

You raised your head and Aerion was already staring at you.

He had seen your face, the wide-eyed terror that you could not control, the way your other hand pressed against your belly with a groan that wasn't only pain. You watched the comprehension move through his face. Watched the anger disappear so completely it was as though it had never existed, replaced by something you had never seen on him in all the time you had known him.

Pure horror.

He dropped to his knees beside you so quickly the movement was almost clumsy. His hands hovered helplessly over you, unable to decide where to touch, terrified of making anything worse. His voice when he found it had nothing of the earlier cruelty left in it, was cracked and desperate.

He said your name, coming out in pieces. He said it again, louder, and again.

You felt the world go grey at the edges.

“No.” His voice broke. “No. No, stay with me-.”

He slipped one arm under your shoulders, the other against your back, taking you to the bed with tenderness. He was shaking, you could feel it in his hands, a fine tremor running through the same hands that had wielded swords, reduced to shaking by this one thing, this one moment, this thing he had done without meaning to.

“Guards!”

The shout cracked through the room and through the door and into the corridor beyond, not a command but a plea. The door burst open, weapons were half-drawn before the guards understood what they were seeing. He didn’t even look at them.

“Get the maester.” His voice had gone frighteningly quiet. “Now.”

The room exploded into motion. Voices, footsteps, the fire being stoked higher so that the room blazed with sudden light, linens appearing from somewhere, the sound of running in the corridor beyond. Aerion's hand found yours, cold fingers intertwined with colder ones, he held on tightly and his other hand settled over the curve of your belly. Then he leaned forward until his forehead rested against your temple, words coming out in a whisper, just for you.

“I'm sorry.” His voice fractured on the word. “I'm so sorry.” He said it again, and again. “Forgive me,” he whispered. “Please forgive me.” The same desperate prayer, each syllable trembling and broken.

You came back to yourself in fragments. A contraction rolled through you with terrifying force, dragging you upward from darkness and slamming you back into your body. Your breath came back first, sharp and gasping, and then your eyes, unfocused on the ceiling and the blazing light above you, then the awareness of where you were, what was happening, the sound of the maester's voice somewhere at the edge of your hearing giving orders.

And through all of it Aerion's hand, still holding yours, your fingers tightened around his.

Another contraction hit, harder than the first, and your back arched and your fingers dug into his hand with a force you had not known you possessed, and a moan escaped that you couldn't contain. You heard the maester's voice cutting through the chaos, clear and firm.

Aerion caught your hand to his lips, a kiss against your knuckles, soft, and then another on the back of your palm, his breath warm and unsteady there, lingering like a prayer he hadn't finished saying, his forehead dipped toward your hand.

“It's okay,” you whispered.

His head lifted immediately, and his eyes found yours, the disbelief in his face almost hurt to see. You were pale and soaked in sweat, in more pain than you had known existed before tonight, and somehow you were the one comforting him.

“It's not your fault,” The words wavered but held.

His Adam’s apple bobbed. “It is,” he said, barely above a breath.

“We can argue about that later.” A weak smile touched your lips. “After.”

Something moved through his expression, something he could not contain and did not try to, for once. He turned his face away for a moment and pressed your hand against his cheek, and you felt him breathe, just breathe, the shaking in his hands had not entirely stopped.

“Push, my lady.” The maester's voice cut through everything. “Now.”

You obeyed.

The sound that came out of you was nothing you recognized as your own voice. It came from somewhere animal and desperate, and your body tensed into it like a bow being drawn past its limits, Aerion stayed beside you, steady as stone, allowing you to crush his hand if you needed to.

“Again! Push!”

You screamed and you pushed harder than the first time.

And then, a cry, small, thin, breaking through the storm and the pain and the chaos of the room like a needle through cloth.

The maester lifted the child, small and red-faced and furious, wailing his outrage at existence. Through your exhaustion you caught sight of silver hair gleaming in the candlelight, that was entirely, unmistakably Aerion’s.

Then the maester's expression changed, only slightly.

“Another.” The room froze. “A second babe my lord, and tangled.”

Aerion's hand went cold around yours; you looked at him, is attention snapped toward the master then toward you. The contractions returning, faster now, harder, your body pressing on before you had been given a moment to simply breathe.

“I can't,” you cried, you had given everything you had, there was nothing left in you to give. “I can't do it-.”

“You can.” The maester's voice, firm but not unkind. He wouldn’t dare to do so in the presence of the brightflame prince.

Aerion bent close, his mouth brushed your ear.

“You can do this.” His voice was rough at the edges, still cracking. “My princess. You are the strongest person in this room. You are the strongest person I have ever met-.” His hand tightened around yours. “You can do this. Do you hear me? You can.”

Somewhere inside yourself, you found one final reserve you didn't know where it had been hiding, didn't know how it still existed.

You pushed, your back lifted from the bed, and Aerion's arm went behind you, an anchor, solid and unwavering, bracing you against the force of yourself.

And then silence, the maester working with swift, silent efficiency, and the room holding its breath around him, and no sound from where the second child should have been. No cry came, no sound. The maester's hands moved, one firm touch, once, twice. He leaned down and breathed into its tiny lungs.

Then, a faint hiccup, so small you almost imagined it. One more breath from the master, one more firm touch against it, and then a cry.

Thin and wavering and furious and entirely, completely, overwhelmingly alive. Your eyes filled instantly, tears spilled before you could stop them. Aerion exhaled hard, pressing a hand over his eyes, a single, private instant, and then it dropped. He looked at the two small faces being cleaned and wrapped in the firelight.

The midwife placed one child carefully in his arms and he looked down. Small, red-faced, silver-haired, tiny fists already protesting the world with remarkable determination. And suddenly every wall he had ever built disappeared, there was nothing left of the prince, there was only a father holding his son.

He leaned toward you, slowly, the child cradled against his chest, and pressed his lips to your forehead, careful and gentle, filled with something too large for words.

You looked at the child in your own arms, your bundle of small, perfect outrage, and felt the child in his being shifted gently closer, until two very small faces were inches apart. Both silver-haired, both absolutely, terrifyingly, entirely real.

“Twins,” you whispered, your voice came out hoarse and ruined but you did not care at all.

Aerion looked at you, his eyes still glassy. “Twins," he said.

“They're perfect,” you said.

He looked down at the small face in his arms.

Then, quietly. “Yes,” he said. “They are.” His thumb brushed the baby's cheek.

Neither of you spoke for a while, your head rested against his shoulder, his arm lay around you. The child in your arms had finally settled, his tiny face relaxed into a peaceful expression, you brushed your thumb over his cheek, his skin was impossibly soft, untouched by wind or sun or the roughness of the world.

You could have stayed like that forever.

“How are we going to call them?” you asked, your voice came out softer than intended, almost swallowed by the crackling fire. The question felt delicate somehow, as though speaking too loudly might break whatever fragile thing had settled over the room.

Aerion was quiet for a moment.

“I have been thinking about it for some time,” he said at last. “I was hoping for your approval.”

You lifted your head enough to look at him and his eyes were on the child in his arms, the first-born.

“Tell me.” you said.

He was quiet for another moment.

“Baelor,” he said. “And Maekar.” He was still watching the child in his arms, and the line of his mouth lifted, too sad to be a full smile. “It is my own immaturity that killed my uncle,” he said with and even voice. “Not my father. It was only my fault.”

He turned slightly, and something in his face stopped the protest before it reached your lips.

“I do not need reassurance,” he said. “Nothing is going to change my mind about that.”

You closed your mouth and he looked back at the child.

“But I thought…” His fingers adjusted the blanket around the baby with surprising care. “Perhaps I could give them another chance. In this new life.” He paused. “To be brothers again.”

The tears came before you could stop them and he turned to look at you then. Whatever reaction he had expected, it clearly was not this, his hand rose, he brushed a tear from your cheek with his thumb, slow and careful.

“Why are you crying, my love?” he asked with genuine confusion.

“Because what you're doing is utterly sweet, Aerion.” Your voice trembled despite yourself. “I'm proud of you.”

For a moment he simply looked at you.

“And of course you have my approval,” you added.

A quiet breath escaped him, a soft laugh, it lingered somewhere close to happiness in his chest. He looked down at the child in his arms, Baelor II. Aerion lowered his head and pressed a kiss to the child's forehead, the touch so light it barely disturbed him.

The child in your own arms stirred, a small, restless shifting, one tiny fist uncurling and recurling against your nightgown, Maekar II. The one who had frightened everyone, the one who had arrived second and nearly not at all, and who seemed, in the brief time you had known him, to have inherited his father's particular talent for making an entrance.

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

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

He blinks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why do you think I chose this face?”

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

You're silent.

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

“I heard you,” he says quietly.

Your breath catches.

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

The lights flicker. Once. Settle again.

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

Your chest goes tight.

“You used to talk,” Better Bobby goes gently, watching your face. “Not to anyone. Not on the phone. Just—out loud. To the room. To yourself. To him, even though he wasn't there. Do you remember?” His thumb traces your jawline, feather-light. “You'd say things like he doesn't listen anymore. And he didn't kiss me goodbye again today, that's the third day in a row, am I keeping count now? Is that what I'm doing? Keeping count?”

Your eyes burn, blurring his familiar features. 

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

“Stop,” you whisper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The rage. The white-hot, screaming, incandescent fury of a woman who gave everything to a man who couldn't be bothered to look up from a television screen, who turned your love into background noise and let you stand in doorways wondering if you were still visible. 

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

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

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

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

It’s then you start crying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“—if I'd been less”—”

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then you reach out and touch his face.

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

Better Bobby goes still.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

You blink. “Something like that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then it returns. 

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

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

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

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

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

You take his hand, and he pulls you up.

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

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

Then the hallway opens.

You stop.

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

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

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

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

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

“How—”

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

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

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

You grab his hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your grip on his hand loosens. Slightly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This is different.”

“Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

He goes still.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You lean your head against his shoulder lightly.

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

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

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

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

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

“I was lonely too,” he admits.

Your heart squeezes, quick and helpless.

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

It's peace.

The walk back is different.

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

And you're talking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Accept help?”

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

BB snorts. “Same thing.” 

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

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

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

“Shut up.”

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

“Can you even get a tattoo?”

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

He stops.

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

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

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

“BB, what—”

He moves.

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

“Please talk to me—”

“Shh.”

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

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

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

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

“What's happening? What's—”

“Stay.”

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

You blink, and he's gone.

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

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

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

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

You wait.

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

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

You wait.

BB comes back eventually.

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

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

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

Something's off.

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

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

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

“BB.”

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

“Hey, baby.”

“What happened?”

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

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

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

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

You stare. “An… entity?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instead, slowly, he nods.

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

“Okay.”

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

“Okay. Deal.”

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

Time passes.

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

You miss the real world.

It hits you at strange moments. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You think about going back.

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

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

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

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

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

Bobby is probably relieved.

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

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

Your presence in every corner asking to be noticed. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And you start mapping instead.

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

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

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

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

One day.

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

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

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

BB watches you work with undisguised fascination.

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

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

Half the time you forget he's not human.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It helps me think.”

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

“Is that a problem?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

BB takes you exploring.

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

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

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

But most days, BB takes you out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The guilt is instantaneous.

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

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

You go quiet. BB notices. 

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

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

You grow comfortable.

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

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

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

You stop keeping count.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A way to survive.

“It's circling again.”

You look up sharply. 

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

You set the pen down. “How close?”

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

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

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

“Yes,” he agrees. “Like that.”

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

“What are you going to do?”

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

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

His mouth parts. 

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

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

“I know the rules.”

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

“You better be.”

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

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

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

He rounds the corner, and the yellow swallows him.

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

You underline unknown twice.

Eleven minutes.

You know this because you've been counting. 

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

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

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

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

You close the notebook slowly.

Six figures come around the corner.

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

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

They waited for BB to leave.

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

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

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

“Ma'am, that's not—”

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

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

He reaches for your arm.

You hit him.

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

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

Then three of them are on you.

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

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

“Fucking—hold her, HOLD HER—”

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

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

“You want to do this the hard way?”

You spit at him. It catches his vest.

He hits you.

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

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

“Stay DOWN—”

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

You open your mouth. You fill your lungs.

And you scream.

“BB—”

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

The fluorescent lights don't flicker. They detonate.

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

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

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

The boot lifts off your back.

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

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

He comes out of the dark.

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

He’s not fully human-shaped.

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

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

He sees you on the ground.

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

BB sees the boot print on your back.

There’s a sound.

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

The remaining fluorescent tube doesn't shatter. 

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

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

It takes less than a minute.

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

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

Then there's nothing.

Silence.

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

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

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

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

You turn over.

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

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

You reach for him.

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

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

You pull yourself into him, and you cling. 

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

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

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

You don't care.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You don't have to.”

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

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

“A little.”

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

“I should have been here.”

“You came.”

“Not fast enough.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah?” Immediate. Soft.

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

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

“Never,” he whispers.

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

You close your eyes.

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

He will do this forever if you let him.

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

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

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

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

You let him.

M.E.G. INTERNAL — MAJOR EXPLORER GROUP

DEPARTMENT OF ENTITY RESEARCH & CONTAINMENT

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

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

SUMMARY OF INCIDENT

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

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

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

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

The Agency disregarded this recommendation.

All six members of the tactical unit are dead.

RECONSTRUCTION OF EVENTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

██:██ — The Companion screams.

██:██ — Entity 0 arrives.

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

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

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

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

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

Level ███ is gone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The engagement lasted approximately 42 seconds.

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

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

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

ASSESSMENT OF CONSEQUENCES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FORMAL OBJECTIONS

I want the following on the record:

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

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

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

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

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

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

RECOMMENDATIONS

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

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

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

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

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

Filed: ██/██/199█

Operations Director ██████

Addendum, handwritten:

She screamed his name, and the level cracked open.

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

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

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

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

God help us all.

he stands. carefully. the headphones still over his ears, the music far-away to you but you know every song by heart anyway. you've played this tape so many times the lyrics are tattooed into your bones. you can hear them faintly leaking through the foam padding when you stand close enough, and you intend to stand very close.

"stop thinking," you instruct. you take his hands. place one on your waist. lace your fingers with the other one and hold it up. "just... follow. feel."

you start to sway. small. easy. side to side. he follows. stiff at first, the proportions slightly off, his weight distribution still that almost-human predator's stillness that doesn't translate well to swaying. but he watches your feet. mirrors them. adjusts. learns.

within a minute he's got it. within two he's smiling.

the song changes to something slower (you know because you've timed the order on this side of the tape, you know what comes next) and you pull him closer without thinking and his hand on your waist tightens. his other hand pulls yours up to his chest and you're pressed against him, swaying in the nest, in the fluorescent dark, and he's dancing.

bb is dancing.

your ear is against his chest now, close enough that you can hear the music humming through the headphone foam, faint but recognisable. you mouth the lyrics against his sternum because you know them, you know every word, and he's wearing the song like a halo around his head while you wear it secondhand through the fabric of his shirt.

you start laughing. you can't help it.

it bubbles up. half giddy, half disbelieving, the absurdity of the moment hitting you all at once. you are slow-dancing with an ancient entity on damp carpet to a song from 1989 and he's taking it so seriously. his concentration bent on getting the rhythm right, his head bowed slightly so the headphones don't slip and so he can keep his face close to your hair. you laugh again and again, burying your face in his chest, your shoulders shaking.

you can feel his confused happiness vibrating through his sternum.

"am i doing it wrong?" he asks. too loud because he's wearing the headphones, he can't tell how loud he is, and that just makes you laugh harder.

"no, baby." you tilt your face up. he's looking down at you with bobby's blue eyes and the headphones slightly askew from the angle of his head and something so soft underneath his expression you could kiss him. "you're doing it perfectly."

his expression softens. that pleased-feline look he gets when you call him baby. the proud one. the i'm being good for you and you noticed one. he resumes the swaying. spins you, experimentally, watching to see if you laugh again. you do. you laugh and stumble back into him and he catches you with such carefulness, cradling you closer.

you teach him to dip you. badly.

he overcorrects the first time and you nearly fall and bb makes a sound that is almost a laugh (bb laughing, actually laughing, a small involuntary sound he's never made before) and you stare at him and he stares back like he's just as surprised about it as you are. the headphones slip slightly. he doesn't fix them. you reach up and adjust them for him, settle them back into place, and his eyes close for a second when your fingers brush his temples.

you teach him to spin you. he picks it up instantly. he's gentle about it, careful with his strength.

at some point you sway too close and your forehead bumps against the side of the headphones and he hears you laugh (actually hears it, the laugh going directly into the headphone foam, mingling with the music) and his whole face lights up. like he just discovered a sound that didn't exist before this moment. he tilts his head deliberately, after that. presses one side of the headphones closer to your mouth. wants more of it. wants the music and you in the same channel.

so you sing.

quietly. badly. against the foam of the headphone he's angled toward you. the lyrics you know by heart, breathed into the small space where the music is leaking out, and bb goes absolutely still in a way that isn't predator-still or even bb-still but something new. like reverence. like he's standing inside something sacred.

his hand on your waist tightens.

"keep going," he says quietly against your hair.

so you do.

you dance until the tape finally clicks over (side B is shorter, you know that too) and then it plays through and ends and the walkman whirs softly but you both keep swaying. to nothing. to the hum of the backrooms. to the rhythm of his impossible non-heartbeat under your ear. the headphones still on his head, silent now, but he doesn't take them off. he doesn't want to take them off. they're proof. they're evidence. they're the crown you put on him and he intends to wear it for as long as you'll let him.

he doesn't want to stop. you can feel it. every time you slow he gently pulls you back into the rhythm. just a little longer. just one more silent song. just one more minute of you laughing against his chest and his hand at your waist and the smile on your face that he knows is for him.

laughter. smiling. touching. all of his favourite you things at once.

he's going to think about this for a while. you can already tell.

every time he goes silent and his eyes go a little distant, you'll know he's replaying it. cataloguing the way you felt against him. the exact sound of your laugh when he dipped you wrong. the weight of your hand in his. the muffled sound of your voice singing into the side of a headphone. he's adding it to whatever he has instead of a heart and turning it over like a smooth stone.

and you know that the next time you reach for the walkman he will be there before the tape finishes rewinding. head bowed. ready for the crown.

he learned. he always learns.