⋆༺𓆩⚔𓆪༻⋆

He smiles. That shy, lopsided thing that doesn't belong on Bobby's face because Bobby never smiled like that; Bobby's smiles were teasing and self-aware and loaded, and this one is open and unguarded and a little bit terrified that you won't like it.

“You do? You like it?”

You lift your eyes toward him, and smile. “I love it.”

The yellow warms toward gold around you. Just slightly. Just enough to notice.

You hold out for months.

That's the part that's going to eat you alive later, the part you'll turn over and over in your head. The part where you knew. 

You knew what kissing him did to you from the first time, that clumsy mortifying moment in the blankets when he'd come in his shorts and watched himself discover his new body. The look on BB’s face had carved itself into you like a brand.

You knew because kissing BB isn't kissing. Kissing BB is a substance. It enters your bloodstream through the point of contact, and within thirty seconds, you can feel it spreading. Warm and heavy and stupid, a fog that settles behind your eyes and at the base of your spine. 

The longer his mouth is on yours, the worse it gets. Or better. You can't tell anymore which of those words applies. The two collapse into the same sensation when BB is touching you because his version of pleasure isn't built on the human axis where good and too-much are different categories.

His skin is cool when he isn't touching you. That's one of the things that took getting used to. The temperature of him. His hands when they find your wrist in the dark, his chest when you lean against him in the nest. Cool like marble or water from a deep well. 

There's warmth underneath the surface, banked and dormant, waiting, but it only comes alive when he touches you. The warmth bleeds through contact, drawn out by your body heat, rising to meet you and then surpassing you. And once the warmth is going, it does things. It sinks. It reads. It feeds information back to him through his palms, fingertips, and mouth, a living scan of your nervous system in real time through his skin.

So you hold out. You let BB kiss you sometimes. Short, careful, your hand on his chest when it threatens to become more. His immediate compliance every single time, pulling back to press his forehead to yours. Just breathing even though he doesn’t need oxygen the way you do, hands shaking on your waist, always mortifyingly patient.

For months after the first kiss. Just that.

“Do you dream?” BB asks one evening, his fingers working over your hair. 

You're lying with your head in his lap. The yellow hum is low tonight, and the ghost-flowers on the wallpaper have settled into stillness for once.

“Sometimes,” you tell him honestly.

“What about?”

You almost say Bobby. You catch it in your teeth. “Home, mostly. The apartment. My side of the bed.”

BB's fingers pause over your hair for half a second. Then they resume, slower.

“Do you miss it?”

You think about that. Really think about it, while his cool fingers stroke over your hair and the hum fills the silence with its tuneless drone. Do you miss it? Do you miss the apartment where Bobby's camera equipment colonised every surface? Do you miss the kitchen where he stopped looking at you? Do you miss your side of the bed, which was your side because Bobby took the other side and the middle and left you the edge.

“I miss what it used to be,” you say quietly. “Before it went bad.”

BB's hand settles on your temple. Warm now, from the contact with your skin. His thumb traces the curve of your eyebrow.

“Tell me about before,” he says softly.

Before was good. That's the thing, the thing that makes the after so unbearable. Before was so good.

Bobby in the early months was a revelation. Bobby with his camera aimed at you across a crowded room, lowering it to grin at you with his whole crooked face, saying the light's doing something crazy on you, babe and meaning it with every fibre of his skinny sun-browned body. 

Bobby who kissed you in parking lots and edited footage with his head in your lap and rolled joints on the kitchen counter while telling you about his day in that low lazy drawl that made your stomach flip even when he was talking about lens caps.

Bobby who touched you like you mattered. Hands on the small of your back in a crowd, arm around your shoulder or waist, always. Fingers laced through yours during movies. His mouth on the back of your neck while you were doing dishes, warm and idle, a press of lips that said I'm here and I like being here. Bobby in bed in the early days, Bobby with his chain tangled between your bodies, looking at you with those pale eyes and saying come here, baby, let me feel you with a softness that undid you every single time.

The good was so good it spoiled you for everything that came after. 

The good taught you what Bobby was capable of, what he contained, and that knowledge made the withdrawal so much worse. Because you knew. You knew he could be tender. You'd seen the inside of him, the soft unguarded core he showed you, and then he'd locked the door.

You'd tried to get back in. That's the part that hurts the most now. 

You'd asked him what was wrong. You'd asked him if he was okay, if he wanted to talk, if he needed space, if you'd done something. You'd tried every key you could think of, and the door stayed shut. And the worst part, the very worst part, was that you could hear him on the other side. You could hear him breathing. He was right there, your Bobby, the real one, the one who filmed you sleeping because the light was good, and he wouldn't open the door for a reason you didn’t know.

That hurt more than the silence. More than the grunting. More than the nights he turned his back. Because the silence you could have explained away. You could have told yourself he'd changed, that the tenderness was a phase, that you'd imagined the depth of it. But you hadn't imagined it. You'd been inside. You'd touched the walls. And knowing what was in there and being locked out of it was a cruelty so singular it felt designed.

You tell BB some of this. Not all. You tell him about the parking lot kisses and the kitchen touches and the way Bobby used to look at you through the viewfinder. The way he hugged you with his whole body every time he saw you, nuzzling into your shoulder with a muffled sigh. You tell him about the door closing. BB listens with his head tilted, his fingers still in your hair, his pale eyes fixed on your face with that total, unwavering attention.

“He had all of that,” BB says quietly when you finish. “And he put it behind a locked door and won’t even tell you why.”

“Yeah.”

“And you kept knocking.”

You force a breath over the lump in your throat. “Yeah.”

BB is quiet for a long time after that. His thumb traces your temple. The yellow walls warm around you, trying to bleed toward gold again.

“I don't have a door,” he says softly, quietly. “I don't know how to build one. Everything I have is right here. You can see all of it.”

You close your eyes, and the purr starts low in his chest.

You don't say anything. But you reach up and press his hand against your cheek, keeping him there, close. BB's breath catches, and he holds perfectly still, and the yellow turns gold.

You hold out for months, and the guilt sits inside you like a stone. 

Guilt for wanting it. Guilt for not wanting it enough. Guilt for thinking about real Bobby while BB's mouth is on you, and guilt for not thinking about real Bobby enough. Guilt for the fact that some traitor part of you has stopped flinching at BB's touch and started anticipating it, leaning into it. 

You go to bed with your back to him and wake up curled into his chest, because your body made a decision before your conscious mind could.

And you didn't leave. 

That's the thing you can't explain to yourself, the thing that damns you. 

You didn't leave because after what happened with Bobby, after months of being invisible in your own space, being wanted felt so good. Being needed felt so good. BB looked at you every single day like the sun rose and set in the shape of your body, and that kind of attention was a drug more potent than anything his kiss could do to your bloodstream. 

You were terrified of how much you liked it. You were more terrified of losing it. 

The nest also changed. You don't remember when. You'd been asleep, and BB had been out, doing whatever BB does when he leaves the territory, and you'd woken to find your apartment.

Not exactly. A yellow-tinged approximation of it, laid overtop the warm patch of carpet. The blankets rearranged into a bed with your bedspread from Santa Clara, the one with the faded blue flowers. The pillows you'd left in the apartment when the wall took you. The little side table with the lamp from the yard sale in Sunnyvale. Even the pattern of the wallpaper had shifted, not away from yellow but around it, a suggestion of the flowered paper you'd hung in the bedroom, ghosted through the buttercup background.

BB had been sitting cross-legged beside the nest when you woke, watching your face for the reaction, hands twisted together in his lap. He'd looked at you with such raw nervous hope that you'd started crying before you understood what he'd built.

“I heard you,” he'd said, voice unsure, small. “You said you missed home. So I—” He gestured at the room, his hands shaking. “I don't know if I got the pattern right. I only saw vague glimpses in your mind. I could change it, if it's wrong.”

You'd crawled into his lap. Buried your face in his neck. His cool skin had warmed slowly under your cheek.

That was weeks ago. Months ago. Time is soft here. It's before you started noticing the flowers on the wallpaper moving when you weren't looking directly at them. Before you noticed the lamp doesn't have a cord. Before you noticed that when BB is happy, the yellow warms toward gold, and when he's worried it cools toward green, and the whole territory has become an extension of his mood.

None of it scares you the way it should. That's the part that actually scares you.

“Baby?”

BB is sitting on the edge of the bed. He's holding a blanket he found somewhere, a thick, dark green wool one, and he's folding it with careful absorption. His long fingers crease the edges. He’s already gazing at you when you glance his way. His eyes are Bobby's blue today, human-shaped, the entity safely tucked away behind the mask.

“Yeah?”

“Can I ask you something?” he asks carefully. 

You nod. “Of course.”

He visibly hesitates, his head lowered. “Do you want to go home?”

Your chest tightens. “BB—”

“You don't have to answer.” He folds the blanket smaller. His voice is steady, and his hands are also steady, but neither of those things is true underneath. “I just… I've been thinking about it. About whether you're staying because you want to or because you don't know how to leave. And I want, baby, I want you to know that if you—” He swallows. “If you need to go... I won't…”

He stops, staring at the blanket in his hands. 

“I won't stop you,” he finishes, practically choking the words out. 

You gaze at him. At the green blanket folded in his lap. At his hands, which are familiar and gripping the wool hard enough to dimple the fabric. At his face, which is Bobby's face and isn't, which is the face of a thing that heard you crying through a wall and built itself a body to hold you and is now offering to let you go because it loves you more than it loves having you.

“I don't know,” you say honestly. “I don't know, BB.”

He nods, keeps folding. You sit together in the quiet, and the yellow is the palest green you've ever seen it, almost grey, and BB's hands are shaking slightly around the blanket, and he's pretending they're not.

That night you lie awake in the nest that looks like your old apartment with BB's arm across your waist, and you think about going home. Really think about it. You think about the apartment in Santa Clara and the kitchen and your mug on the drying rack and your shoes by the mat. You think about Bobby. You think about whether Bobby is sitting in that apartment right now, or if he moved on without you there to nag him.

You think about going back to him, walking through the wall and climbing the stairs. Finding him. And you try to feel what that would be like, the reunion, the homecoming, and what you feel is—

Grief. You feel grief. 

Because going home means going back to Bobby, and going back to Bobby means going back to a man who locked the door. Who might open it now, might fling it wide, might weep and hold you and swear he'll be different. But you've spent months on the other side of that door. Months knocking. Months making yourself smaller and smaller to fit through the crack underneath. And even if Bobby opens the door now, you know what it's like when it's closed. You know the sound of his back turning. You know the weight of his indifference. You carry it in your bones.

The relationship was over months before you left. You know that now. The wall in Clark's basement didn't end your relationship with Bobby. Bobby ended it. Quietly, one day at a time, one turned back at a time, and you'd stood in the wreckage pretending it was still standing because the alternative was admitting you'd been alone for months in a room with someone who used to love you.

You're only here because you're finally letting the ghost of going home go.

Because letting BB in means choosing the yellow. Choosing the hum. Choosing a place with no sky and no weather. No yard sales on El Camino with golden retrievers named Mango. Letting BB in means letting the real world go, and admitting that the girl who fell through the wall in Clark's basement is not the girl sitting in this nest. 

That girl was going home. That girl was holding on. 

This girl has let go of everything except the creature beside her, and she doesn't want to pick any of it back up. 

It means letting Bobby's ghost go, too. 

The real one, the Bobby who exists in Santa Clara, the one who grunts at your goodbyes, that Bobby has been a ghost to you for longer than BB has been real. And the Bobby you've been holding onto, the candle in the draft, the one who filmed you sleeping and called you my girl, that Bobby is a memory. 

A beautiful, aching, preserved memory of a man who doesn't exist anymore. 

Loving a memory is not the same as loving a person. A memory can't change. A memory can't hurt you, can't grow, can't learn. A memory just sits in your chest, glows, and keeps you warm, and slowly, slowly starves you because you're using it to feed a hunger it was never designed to fill.

BB is not a memory. BB is real. He’s flawed in his own inhuman ways, learning in real time, and holding you right now, his cool arm across your waist, his purr a low vibration you can feel through the mattress. BB is the one who brought you a red button because your mom had a red mug years ago. BB is the one who offered to let you leave even though it would destroy him.

You love him. Not as a replacement. Not because he wears the right face. You love the thing behind the face. The thing that has no door, that never had it.

You turn over. Press your face into BB's chest. His arms tighten around you at once, his skin warming under your cheek.

“I'm staying,” you tell him in a tender whisper.

BB goes still.

“You—”

“I'm staying, BB,” you tell him again, pressing closer, tucking yourself close. “I'm choosing this. I'm choosing you.”

The purr cracks. Breaks apart. Reassembles into something so deep and so full it vibrates in your skull. BB's arms crush you against him and his face buries in your hair, and he's shaking, shaking, his cool body warming everywhere you touch him, and the yellow floods gold. 

The whole room, the whole level, gold as sunlight, gold as the thing inside his chest that has waited longer than time itself for someone to say those exact words.

You kiss him the next day.

He's beside you in the nest, cross-legged, telling you about a level he found that loops back on itself, and you're half-listening, more focused on the shape of his mouth than the words coming out of it. You lean over and press your lips to the hinge of his jaw. Just there. A small, warm press between his ear and his chin. 

BB falters mid-sentence. A stutter, a swallow, his eyes flicking to you and away.

“—and the walls change texture right where it loops, which is, um. Interesting because—”

You kiss the corner of his mouth. Lightly. Barely there. And your hand finds the back of his nape.

BB stops talking.

His neck is cool under your palm. Smooth, the tendons shifting as he swallows. Your fingers curl into the short hair at his nape. The change is immediate: his skin warming under your touch, temperature rising from mild to warm in three heartbeats. 

“Baby,” he says carefully, his voice dropping half an octave. “What are you—”

You kiss him again. On the mouth. Full. Your lips part against his, and you make it different. You don't hold back. You don't keep your hand on his chest as a brake. You kiss him with your whole body leaning into it, and your hand on his nape tightens, pulling him closer.

BB makes a sound against your lips. Small. Startled. His hands come up to your waist on instinct, and you can feel them warm against your skin in real time, heat blooming where you're connected. He's bracing himself for the pull-back. He's already preparing to be patient about it.

You press forward instead. Your weight shifts, your knee coming up onto the blankets, your body tipping into his. BB's hands tighten on your waist. You can feel the exact moment he realises you're not stopping, his fingers digging in, his breath hitching, his mouth opening wider for you. And you push him.

Gentle but firm, both hands on his chest now, and BB goes where you push him. 

His back hits the wall. The ghost-flowered wallpaper presses against his shoulder blades, and you're in his lap, knees on either side of his hips, chest against his chest. You kiss him fully. Mouth open. Tongue sliding against his. Your fingers in his hair and your hips pressing down against him and every last ounce of restraint you've been maintaining for months dissolving into the heat flooding through you.

The heat. The fog. It hits you the second you stop fighting it. Months of buildup pouring through. Your head swims. Your skin goes electric. BB's warmth blazes against you, drawn out by your body, his cool skin going hot wherever you touch him.

BB moans. Deep, ragged, pulled from somewhere below his chest, vibrating through his ribs into yours. Hungry and wanting. The sound of a creature starved, weak with wanting you so much. 

His hands move. They stop being still on your waist, and they move. Both of them, everywhere at once, kneading. His fingers grip the fat of your hips. His palms slide up your ribs. His hands cup your breasts through your shirt, fingers pressing and kneading with a desperate, tactile hunger. He needs to touch all of you at once, and two hands aren't enough.

His tongue slides along your lower lip, longer than it should be, and you open your mouth wider and let him in. BB groans desperately, his hips rolling up against you.

The sound is wet. BB’s tongue slides against yours in a coil that tightens and releases in eager pulses, saliva building between your joint mouths. The kiss is messy and open, drool collecting at the corner of your lips because you can't swallow around the thickness of his tongue filling your mouth.

You roll your hips against him again, harder. BB makes a broken sound, and his head drops back against the wall, his throat baring. You kiss it. The spot his pulse should be, his Adam's apple, the hollow at the base. His skin is warm now, fully warm, almost hot.

You pull back, your face inches from his. Your hands settle on his chest, feeling his heartbeat slamming against your palms. BB’s eyes are half-black. His mouth is swollen and wet, gaping open. His hands grip your hips hard enough to leave marks, his whole body trembling.

“I want you,” you gasp against his lips.

BB goes still. Every muscle in his body locks, his hands freezing on your hips. His breathing stops. His eyes search your face with an intensity that has nothing to do with Bobby and everything to do with the ancient thing behind the mask.

“You—” His voice trembles, going thin. “You want—”

You press your forehead against his. “I want you, BB.”

“Do… do you mean—”

“I mean all of it,” you rasp, your hand slipping into his hair. “I mean you."

BB’s face cracks open. His expression unravels completely, and what's underneath is raw and enormous and terrified and so, so joyful. His eyes go fully black, the entity surging to the surface, and he looks at you like you've just handed him the universe.

“You want me,” he whispers desperately, testing the words, faint with disbelief.

You cup his face with both hands. Your palms on his jaw, your thumbs on his cheekbones. His skin is burning under your hands.

“I want you,” you repeat, and you kiss him. Deeper. Slower. His tongue coils around yours, gentle, trembling, the grip shaky because BB is shaking, his whole body is.

He pulls back a centimetre, forehead nudging against yours. Eyes black and wet as they drink you in.

“I waited so long,” he whispers, his voice pained. “I waited so long for you. You don't know how long I was alone. And there was nothing. Just the hum, and the yellow. And then there was you. I heard your voice and I—”

His breath hitches, a wounded sound vibrating at the back of his throat.

“I'd rarely heard anything except the hum and the things in the dark, but then you were on the other side of the wall, and you were talking. Your voice… it was the first beautiful thing I ever heard. I built this—” He touches his own face. Bobby's face. His hand trembling. “I built all of this for you. Because I heard you crying and needed hands because you were sad. And I… I wanted to hold you, and I didn't have anything to hold you with.”

Tears burn your eyes. BB's thumbs trace your cheekbones lightly, wiping the tears as they threaten to escape.

“You were born for me,” he breathes, fierce and tender all at once. “I know that now. I was in the walls for—I don't have a number. But then you came along, and I knew. I was waiting for you this whole time. You were always going to be mine. I just had to learn how to deserve you.”

“I love you,” you choke out. “BB. I love you.”

He makes a broken, needy sound, pressing kisses to your face, your cheek, your jaw, your eyelids, the corner of your mouth. “I love you. Let me touch you. Please. Baby, please. I've waited so long.”

“Yes,” you whisper. “Take me to bed.”

He carries you. Two steps, three, his inhuman strength on casual display, and he lays you down on the bedspread with the faded blue flowers. 

His hands are shaking. The purr starts in his chest, a deep warm vibration you can feel through the mattress. He kneels between your legs and looks at you, just looks. His mouth swollen and wet. His chest heaving.

“I don't know how to. I've never—”

“I know.” You reach up and cup his face. His cool skin warms immediately under your palm. “I know, baby. I'll show you. I've got you.”

He drops down against you, his weight settling along your body, his face burying in your neck. His mouth opens against your pulse, and you feel his tongue, just the tip, tracing the vein under your skin. His lips close over your pulse point, and he sucks gently, the purr vibrating through his mouth into your neck.

“You're so warm,” he breathes against your skin. “Baby. You're so warm. I've been cold forever. And you're like a fire. I can feel your heartbeat through your skin. You're so alive. You're the most alive thing I've ever touched.”

His hands slide up your sides, pushing your shirt. His palms drag over your ribs, warming as they travel, and you can feel each finger pressing independently, the cool-to-warm transition happening in streaks along your skin. He pushes your shirt up and off, and his breath catches.

“Oh,” he exhales. Awed. “Oh.”

His hands hover an inch above your body, fingers spread, trembling. He looks at you like touching might break him entirely.

“It's okay,” you whisper. “BB. Touch me.”

Both hands settle on your breasts. Cool palms cupping you, and his temperature spikes, warming fast from the centre of his palms. His thumbs drag across your nipples, and you arch into the sensation, shivering.

“There,” he breathes. “Look at you. You're so soft. I've been touching concrete and monsters forever, and you're, you're so—”

He ducks his head and presses his mouth to the swell of your breast. Open-mouthed. Hot. His tongue slides out, the tip tracing the curve of you in a wet drag, and you gasp. BB makes a hungry sound against your skin, half moan, half purr.

“You taste alive,” he murmurs between greedy, slick licks. “I don't have a word, baby. You taste like everything I was missing.”

His mouth finds your nipple. His tongue coils around it, wrapping and squeezing gently, and he sucks. The purr intensifies, vibrating through his lips and his tongue into you. You cry out, sharp and broken, cupping his head to keep him there.

BB's hand kneads your other breast, fingers gripping, the wrong-textured pads of his thumbs dragging across your nipple. Between the attention to both at once, your head swims, your hips lifting off the bed. He murmurs praise into your skin, pulling off with a wet pop to press his open mouth to the underside of your breast, licking the crease there, nosing into the soft skin desperately.

“So beautiful. You have no idea what you look like. I didn't even know what this body was for until I saw you.”

He sucks a mark into the inner curve of your breast, suckling greedily. Then his mouth moves lower. BB’s tongue draws a long, unbroken line from between your breasts to your navel. He presses his mouth flat against your stomach and breathes in, eyes fluttering shut.

“I could stay here forever,” he mumbles against your belly. “Just breathing you in. You smell warm. I didn't know warm had a smell until you.”

BB’s fingers hook into your underwear and pull them down gradually. His breath catches as he bares you. His eyes go wide and fully black, fixed between your thighs. He's looking at you with such naked reverence it steals your breath.

“You're wet,” he says, hushed. His thumbs trace the crease where your thighs meet your hips, slow even as you sense the shaking still quaking his fingertips. “So wet, baby. Is that for me?”

You shiver at the touch, squirming. “Yes. All for you, BB.”

BB’s whole, borrowed body shudders at the confirmation. His tongue slides out, long and sinuous, and he licks his lips with it. The hunger on his face is staggering.

“Let me taste you,” he begs quietly. “Baby, please. I've never… please.”

Heat floods through your veins, molten and thick, at the pleading note in his voice. “Yes. God, yes.”

BB drops down immediately. His mouth presses to the inside of your knee. Cool lips warming as they drag up your inner thigh, pressing open-mouthed kisses into the soft skin there. His tongue traces the path, licking long wet stripes up your thigh. He pauses an inch away. Breathes. His breath is hot and damp, and your hips jerk toward him.

“You smell so good,” he murmurs. “And you're hot. I can feel it on my face.”

His tongue makes contact. Long and wet, dragging flat from the base of you all the way up. You sob, and your hands fly to his hair. BB makes a deep, guttural moan that vibrates through his tongue and into you, the purr kicking up so hard it vibrates the bed frame. His fingers dig into your thighs, and his mouth opens wide, and he licks you again. Slower. Longer. The tongue lingering at the top, the tip curling and pressing between your folds curiously.

“Baby. Baby. You taste… you’re dripping for me and so alive. I can't stop, I can't—”

He buries his face in you. His mouth open and his tongue extended to its full impossible length, lapping and stroking and coiling with the desperate, artless hunger. The sounds are obscene. Wet, squelching, sloppy. Saliva and your own arousal mix and drips down his chin. BB’s moaning into you with a continuous low vibration, his fingers gripping your thighs hard enough to bruise, pulling you closer, pressing his face deeper, taking more.

“More,” you gasp through a breathy moan. “BB, more. Please.”

His tongue extends further. Longer. Longer. You feel it pressing inside you, and your hips buck, and BB growls against your clit then keeps pushing. The muscular length of it curls and coils inside you, filling you, reaching deeper than fingers could reach. Deeper than anything human could, and you feel it pressing against the back of you, the very deepest place, and your whole body seizes.

“BB, that's, oh God, that's—”

His tongue presses against the mouth of your womb. The tip of it, delicate and hot, nudging that innermost barrier, and the sensation is so deep and so foreign that your entire body goes rigid and your hands yank at his hair and you make a gasping, yelping sound. High and ragged, pitching toward half a scream.

BB moans into you. The vibration travels through the full length of his tongue, from your clit where his lips are sealed to the deepest place where the tip is pressing. Stimulation at both ends simultaneously and all through the middle, his tongue moving, coiling and uncoiling, massaging places that have never been touched. His lips close over your clit and suck, hard, and the tongue is so deep you can feel it in your stomach.

You're thrusting into his face. Your hips rolling, grinding against his mouth, and BB makes a pleased sound and holds you tighter to him, delighted. Then his hands clamp on your thighs, and he pins you. Presses your hips flat to the mattress with an inhuman grip you couldn't break if you tried, and the sudden loss of control makes you writhe.

Your sounds don't belong to you anymore. You're gripping his hair with both fists. BB is purring so hard the vibration sits at the back of your throat, and his tongue is touching places that have never been bordered. His chin is soaked, and you can hear the wet, filthy sounds, and you're sobbing, thrashing against his grip.

“You're gonna come for me,” he mumbles against you, his mouth never fully leaving. “I can feel it. So close, baby. Give it to me. I want to taste you when you come.”

You come. Hard. 

Your whole body arches against BB’s grip, thighs clamping around his head, hands pulling his hair. BB moans into you and holds you down and licks you through it, his long tongue working inside you as you clench and spasm around him. 

He's swallowing, sucking, drawing every last drop into his mouth and gulping it down hungrily. His lips close over your swollen folds and he laps at them, slow and thorough, licking you clean with long flat drags. Each pass over your over-sensitive skin makes you twitch and whimper, and he keeps going. Collecting every trace of wetness, every last drop, his tongue dragging through the mess of you with a patience that borders on worship.

“Every drop,” he's murmuring, practically slurring. “I want every drop. My perfect girl.”

His tongue retracts gradually, inch by inch, and you can feel every inch leaving you. The emptiness when it's gone is aching.

BB presses a kiss to your cunt. Right there. Soft. His swollen lips against your swollen folds, gentle and lingering. He pulls back just enough to breathe against you.

“I'll be inside here soon, baby,” he murmurs, his lips brushing your throbbing core as he speaks. “Right here. Right where my tongue was. I'll be so deep. I'll fill you up.” Another kiss. Softer, absent. Like he has no idea what his words and actions are doing to you. “I'll take good care of you. I promise.”

He crawls up your body. Wet open-mouthed kisses up your stomach, between your breasts, on your throat. He tastes like you. You can taste yourself on his tongue when he kisses your mouth, wet and deep, and the intimacy of it, tasting yourself inside his kiss, makes your whole body clench.

“I need you,” he pants against your lips. “I need to be inside you. Please. I need—”

You peck his lips, breathing against them, “Go on. Need you, too. But I want you to show me. Show me what you really are.”

He goes still. The fear rises behind Bobby's eyes. His whole body goes rigid, and his hands tighten on your hips.

“It’s fine.” His voice quivers. “I can keep the shape. You don't have to—”

You trace his cheek, outlining the ridge of his cheek. “I want to.”

“I don't—” He swallows hard. “I don't want you to see me and—” His jaw pulses from how hard he’s clenching his teeth. “What if you can't look at me after? What if I'm—”

“BB.” You cup his jaw, the constructed bones trembling under your palms. “Whatever you're comfortable with. Whatever you want to show me. I'm not going anywhere.”

He gazes down at you. Black-eyed and trembling, searching your face for the lie, for the flinch, for the moment you take it back. He doesn't find it.

“Okay,” he whispers. “Okay. Just, just a little. Let me just…”

His jaw sharpens under your hands. Just slightly. The line of it going harder, more angular, the bone shifting beneath his skin. He watches your face the whole time, ready to snap back at the first sign of revulsion.

You stroke your thumb over his newly sharp cheekbone. “Beautiful,” you exhale.

BB makes a low, choked sound. His eyes go wider, blacker. The pupils elongate slightly, going vertical. He's shivering. Genuinely shivering, full-body tremors, and you can feel his skin gaining a faint iridescent sheen under your palms, cool and smooth.

“More?” he asks, barely audible.

You take him in, all of him. “More, baby.”

His shoulders lengthen. His neck gains an inch. The proportions of his face slide further from Bobby, the mouth too wide, the cheekbones too high, and you trace the new angles with your fingertips and press your mouth to his jaw and lick the iridescent skin and BB whines. High and desperate and pleased.

“You're… you're not—” He's stammering, trembling in your hold. “You're not scared?”

“I'm not scared, BB. Keep going.”

He gives you more. His spine gains extra vertebrae you can feel through his skin, his torso gaining a sinuous quality. The ghost of a diamond pattern moves beneath his skin, the suggestion of scales. His fingers lengthen slightly, extra articulation appearing in the joints.

You run your palms down his chest, trace the diamond pattern. You press your mouth to his collarbone, where the iridescent sheen is strongest, and kiss the skin there, open-mouthed, tasting the chilly smoothness of him.

BB drops his face into your neck. Hiding. He's hiding, his too-sharp jaw pressed against your shoulder, his shivering intensifying, and you can feel his features still shifting against your skin. He's giving you more, but he can't watch you see it.

“Hey,” you coax, putting your hand under his chin. Tip his face up. “Hey. Look at me.”

He resists for a second. Then he lets you lift his face.

He looks alien. His eyes are polished obsidian, no whites. His jaw is too defined. His mouth is too wide. The iridescent skin catches the yellow light in shimmering refractions. He looks terrified. He looks beautiful.

“There you are, baby,” you whisper, and lean up and kiss him.

BB produces a broken, grateful sound against your mouth, and the purr comes back so hard the walls vibrate.

He adjusts his position, still kissing you as he settles between your thighs, and you understand, immediately, that he’s not a copy.

The mimicry that he's maintained for months falls away the second BB pushes inside you. He's BB. A creature in a body he built to love you, figuring out what it can do in real time.

The shape of him inside you is not human. It's close enough that the entry works. But once he's seated, the texture is wrong, and the temperature is wrong, cool at first then warming fast, and he fills you in ways men don't. His anatomy is adjusting, learning you, reshaping moment by moment. Ridges where there were none. Swells of pressure in places human anatomy couldn't produce. The length of him moving with a sinuous quality. And it's still changing, adjusting his shape to hit exactly what makes you cry out.

“Oh baby,” he breathes, his voice cracking, ragged. “I can feel everything. I can feel your heartbeat through your—” He shudders, his back arching like it’s too overwhelming. “How do humans survive this?”

“BB, you feel so good, right there, don’t stop, baby—”

You press your hips up against him, taking him deeper, squeezing him with your inner muscles, and BB makes a choked, groaning sound, his whole body going taut above you. 

You can feel the fullness of him shifting inside you, the ridges dragging, his cock reshaping in response to the pressure of your squeeze. Where you tighten, he swells. Where you release, he fills. It's a feedback loop made flesh, his anatomy learning yours in real time, and the sensation is so foreign and so full that your eyes water.

“Yeah? Is that good?” His voice breaks. His hips roll again, deeper this time, and the ridges snag and drag on the withdrawal, a slow slick pull that makes an obscene dripping sound. You both gasp at it. You both hear it. The slick, filthy evidence of how wet you are, how aroused, and BB's eyes go glassy, his mouth falling open. “Tell me. Tell me I’m good.”

You adjust your thighs again, opening even wider, hooking your ankles behind his back and pulling him in until he's nestled so deep you can feel the cool-turning-warm base of him flush against you. The fullness is immense, a stretch that borders on too much, and you squeeze him again and BB's arms buckle. His elbows hit the mattress on either side of your head, and his face is inches from yours. 

His mouth opens, and the sound he makes is a raw, ruined whine.

“Y-You're perfect, BB. Don't, ah, stop.”

He rolls his hips again. Slow, sinuous, that serpentine wave he can't suppress anymore, and the motion drags his cock against you, every ridge and swell and shifting contour lighting up nerve endings you didn't know you had. The slick sounds between your bodies are continuous now, a gushing symphony between your joint flesh. You can feel your own arousal dripping down onto the sheets below, and you don't care because the fullness is extraordinary, and every roll of his hips makes the ridges snag against your walls and catch and pull, and each pull sends you closer to the edge.

You push your hips up to meet his next stroke. The impact makes you both groan. You do it again. Finding a tempo together, his wave and your thrust, the wet lewd sounds getting louder, and BB is panting against your mouth, his breath hot and damp, his eyes half-closed.

“You're so tight,” he gasps. “Baby, every time you squeeze me I can feel your whole body, I can feel everything tighten, you're gripping me so hard, and it's, it's—”

You squeeze him harder. On purpose. Clench around the shifting shape of him and hold. BB's eyes fly open, and his mouth stretches wide, and a sound comes out of him that’s pure entity, a harmonic moan that vibrates through his cock and into you and through the walls. His hips stutter out of the wave and slam forward, involuntary, and the ridges catch deep inside you and your back bows off the bed.

“There,” you gasp, your eyes burning from burning pleasure ravaging through your body.

“There,” he echoes, awed. “I can feel what that does to you. I didn't know anything could—”

He shudders, and his features shift with it. His jaw sharpens a degree. The iridescence pulses brighter on his cheekbones. He ducks his face into your neck, hiding.

“No,” you say, breathless, your hand tangling into his sandy hair. “Let me see you.”

He resists. His jaw pressed against your shoulder, his breath ragged against your throat.

“BB. Let me see.”

He lets you lift his face, his features having slipped further. Cheekbones too high. Mouth even wider. The iridescence brighter. His eyes are completely black and wet, and he's so scared, you can see it. You look directly into them and say, “Don't hide from me. You're beautiful.”

BB makes a strangled sound, his hips stuttering. The purr cracks and reforms. His features shift more, right in front of you, and you watch them move, watch his face rearrange itself in real time, and the intimacy of it makes you reel. Because it’s more intimate than the sex. He’s literally coming apart in front of you and letting you watch.

“Good,” you moan, stroking his shifting jaw. “That's it, BB.”

The pleasure isn't building in a line; it's accumulating in layers. 

His hand under your back, lifting you. His mouth on your throat, usually cool lips searing. His thumb at the hinge of your hip, longer now, bending where thumbs don't bend. The appendages emerging one by one, warm and tapered, gripping your thighs, holding your legs open at an obscene angle. Each one a new layer feeding into the one beneath it.

His hips slam deeper, and your breasts ripple with the force. BB is watching, his too-wide mouth lolling open, and his eyes are glazed, his features shifting faster now, responding to pleasure the way a human face flushes. His jaw sharpens then softens then sharpens again. His pupils dilate and contract in pulses seemingly against his control. 

“Look at what I do to you,” he pants, his voice hitting a deeper register that’s decidedly not Bobby. “I can't stop touching you. Your skin is so soft, every part of you is burning for me, and you're—” His voice fails him. He ducks his face into your neck again, his features shifting against your skin, and you feel the rasp of scales that aren't quite scales, there and gone.

You pull him back up again, hold his face. He's whining, high and continuous, his eyes wet.

“Stay with me,” you say. 

He moans loudly. His features ripple again, even further from Bobby, and his mouth is trembling, and BB looks destroyed, open, the ancient thing behind the mask laid bare while he fucks you, and the vulnerability of it makes your chest ache.

“You're incredible,” he breathes. “You're so wet for me, all of this is for me. I can f-feel how close you are. I can feel it building. Baby, please. Come for me."

Your orgasm rips through you, and BB snarls at the sensation, his features sharpening, the entity surging to the surface, and he doesn't stop, doesn't slow. His hips keep working ruthlessly. The shape of him inside you keeps shifting with each thrust. The appendages grip your thighs tighter, and your orgasm rolls into another one immediately, pinned down, taking whatever he gives you.

“That's it,” he purrs against your ear, nuzzling. “My girl. I can feel you fluttering around me. I've never felt anything like you.”

His tongue slides out, longer than it should be. Drags up the side of your neck. His teeth catch your earlobe, too sharp, and the tiny sting makes you gasp. His hand kneads your breast, gripping, his ridged thumb dragging across your nipple.

“You're so perfect,” he mumbles against your ear, his hips still working, the wet squelching symphony filling the room. “Every time I push in, I can feel you opening and closing around me, and it's—baby, it's the best thing I've ever felt, it's better than anything, you're better than anything—”

His length adjusts on every stroke, swelling and contracting, ridges rubbing against your sensitive walls. The sheets are getting damp beneath you. BB is moaning with every thrust now, layered over the purr, and the purr is vibrating through his cock and into you.

You can't control the sounds coming out of you. You're moaning and sobbing continuously, mindless, drool on your chin, tears on your face, your nails clawing at his back and leaving furrows in the iridescent skin.

The third hits. Your whole body seizes with it. BB cock swells inside you, expanding impossibly, and the stretch shoves you over again, a fourth on the heels of the third. 

“That's it,” he gasps. “You're taking me so well. You're the first. The only one. There's never been anyone except you.”

The truth of those words hits you straight in the heart. He made this body for you. It has never known anyone else, and likely never will. 

By the fifth round, you can't produce words anymore. Your mouth is open, and nothing's coming out. BB is murmuring into your skin, his tongue licking the tears off your cheeks, tasting your throat, your sweat, every available inch of skin. Your body is nothing but sensation. He's whispering, awed and dazed: “I've got you, baby. So brave. So warm. You're everything, my everything.”

Around the sixth, your hands go limp. Your whole body goes slack except for the involuntary tremors. You're drooling freely onto the pillow. Your eyes are glazed and half-open. You’re conscious but only just, held in a state of continuous pleasure that has dissolved every boundary between your body and his.

BB feels himself getting close. His breathing changes. His hips lose their fluid wave and become harder, urgent, perfectly ruthless. The purr breaks into a low keening sound, and he pulls back.

He cups your ass. Both hands, those long wrong-jointed fingers gripping the flesh of you. He raises your hips off the mattress, tilts you up toward him. Holds you there, suspended.

And he peers down. At your stomach.

You follow his gaze through the fog. You look down at your own body.

You can see him. The shape of him moving inside you. A subtle bulge beneath the skin of your lower stomach, pressing outward with every thrust, the length of him shifting and adjusting. The bulge presses up and recedes in time with his hips. Your stomach ripples with each motion.

BB is staring, transfixed. His black eyes are nailed to the sight of himself inside you, his mouth parted. 

“Look at that,” he purrs, and this time you see and hear the predator underneath, satisfied with what he’s seeing. “Look at that. I can see myself inside you. You're so full of me.”

He presses deeper, and the bulge pushes higher. You moan, a thin broken sound, and BB makes a soft noise back, almost soothing, and his hips work faster, holding you up, watching himself move inside you.

“You're taking all of me,” he remarks appreciatively, head cocked. “Every inch. Look at what you're holding.”

His tongue extends, slipping to wrap around the spot where his cock keeps sliding into you, and you moan when the tip prods almost playfully at your swollen clit. 

He thrusts into you twice more, hard and deep, finishing inside you with a pleased sigh.

Warm. Impossibly warm. It pulses in time with the harmonic, filling you, filling and filling, overflowing, spilling out around him. The faint gold glow. Pale and luminescent, pooling on your inner thighs, gushing down onto the sheets. Puddles of it. The bed soaked. His release casts a soft light upward onto both your bodies. BB is still inside you, still shaking through it, his mouth on your neck, licking slow grateful stripes up the column of your throat now. 

You’ve never heard the purr going louder. 

“You did so good, baby,” he rasps affectionately, peppering small kisses behind your ear. “Look at what you took. All of me.”

You can't answer. You can barely breathe. Your whole body is a limp pile of limbs beneath him. You’re boneless against the pillows, drool on your chin, tears drying on your face, hair plastered to your forehead.

BB pulls back to examine you. His face is a mess, too, half-slipped, jaw too sharp on one side and human on the other. Black eyes and swollen mouth, chin still dripping with you. He's grinning. That dark pleased grin, all predator, the purr rumbling on in his chest cavity.

His hips roll again. Slow, testing. Still hard inside you.

“Again, baby?” Low, dark, almost mocking. “One more for me?”

You don't have one more in you. You’re empty, wrung out, incapable of forming sentences.

You nod anyway.

BB whines, high and pleased, and drops his mouth back to yours and starts moving all over again.

He fucks you until you black out.

You lose consciousness somewhere in the middle because your body cannot sustain the amount of pleasure being poured into it and your brain, mercifully, shuts down. The last thing you're aware of is BB's purr vibrating through both your bodies and the faint gold glow pooling under you and his mouth against your temple whispering I love you, I love you, I waited so long, I love you.

When you come back, you have no idea how long it's been. You're clean. He's cleaned you. The bed is dry. You're wrapped in the blankets, wearing one of his shirts. BB is curled around you, human-shaped again, mostly, his face buried in your hair, his arm heavy across your waist. He’s purring. Low and pleased and constant. His skin is cool again, warm only where you're pressed together.

You stir. He notices immediately.

“Baby,” he calls out, his mouth finding your temple. “You're awake. Are you okay? Did I… was I too—”

“Perfect,” you slur, your throat aches from the sheer amount of moaning and screaming you’ve done. “You were perfect, BB.”

He goes still. Then he shudders, his arm tightening around you. He presses his mouth to your hairline and holds it there for a long time. The purr deepens into something so full it borders on mournful, loving, perfectly content.

“I love you,” he says, his voice small, shy again. “I love you more than anything.”

Your eyes burn, but for a different reason now. “I love you too, BB.”

He shivers at the words, a full-body reaction. Under the blankets, one of the appendages, not retracted all the way, probably never fully retracting again, curls around your thigh. Possessive. Settling. Warming as it holds.

“Again later,” he murmurs against your temple. That cocky dark satisfaction layered underneath the tenderness. “We're going to do that again.”

You should be terrified.

But you’re not. Because you’re finally home.

You fall asleep to the sound of BB’s purring, and his whispered I love you in the yellow light of a nest that looks like your old apartment, in the arms of an ancient lonely being that has finally, finally been chosen.

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

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

BB goes still.

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

His hand opens.

Bobby drops down.

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

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

You let go of BB, stepping back.

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

His hand halts mid-air.

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

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

You stepped back from him.

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

His hand drops to his side.

“What the fuck.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He's shaking. Full body vibration.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Bobby—” Kat whispers, reaching for him.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You moved on too,” you say lastly.

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

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

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

“That's not—”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Don't touch me.”

BB's hand freezes midair.

“You're no better.”

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

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

“Did you know?” you bite out.

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

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

BB's expression goes smooth.

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

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

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

The room is quiet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mr. Kitty steps into his path.

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

BB snarls.

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

“Get out of my way.”

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

Mr. Kitty doesn't move.

The house begins to vibrate.

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

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

His domain, his territory, his rules.

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

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

“Enough.”

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

“Stop it. Both of you. Right now.”

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

You look at BB.

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

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

The vibration cuts out.

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

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

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

Mr. Kitty steps aside.

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

BB does not follow.

The bedroom is pink.

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

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

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

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

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

A plate appears on the bedside table.

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

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

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

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

Are you feeling better, little one?

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

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

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

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

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

You gesture vaguely at the room, at yourself.

No.

A pause.

I'm not human.

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

You snort wetly despite yourself, wiping your nose.

“Is everyone okay? Out there?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Tell me.”

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

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

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

“Has it—is it gone?”

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

The words settle on your shoulders.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Thank you, Mr. Kitty.”

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

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

Bobby and Kat are sitting at the kitchen table.

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

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

Bobby spots you first.

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

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

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

You see it. You look away from it.

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

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

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

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

Bobby surprises you by holding that look.

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

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

“BB,” you call out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“I can't,” he says.

“BB—”

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

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

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

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

You run the route in your head.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How far?” you ask.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You inhale deeply. “Bobby.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

BB turns to you.

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

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

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

He's thinner somehow.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Let's go,” you say.

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

They follow.

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

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

You lead. They follow.

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

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

Something skitters in the walls.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Right. The Poolrooms."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“How long did it take?”

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

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

“Before you slept with her.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Level 4 is wrong.

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

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

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

Your notes are wrong.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The evidence of BB is everywhere.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The hands come from behind you.

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

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

These aren't M.E.G.

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

Bobby's scream rips through the corridor.

“GET YOUR HANDS OFF HER—GET OFF—”

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

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

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

Your rage swells to near blinding.

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

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

The hands holding you fall off.

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

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

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

You turn.

Entity X is standing in the corridor behind you.

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

On you. Only you. As always.

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

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

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

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

The audio equivalent of the eyes that never leave.

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

Entity X cocks its head.

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

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

Entity X doesn't look at them.

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

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

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

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

BB arrives like a thunder crack.

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

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

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

“The outpost. Go. Now.”

You run, reaching for Bobby blindly.

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

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

You spot them in the distance first.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It throws Bobby.

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

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

Bobby is dazed.

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

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

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

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

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

They're gone.

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

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

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

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

BB's hand finds your shoulder.

The world folds.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It takes minutes. Several.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why didn't you tell me?”

BB falls silent.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“BB. Tell me the truth.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You look back at BB.

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

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

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

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

You touch his face.

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

BB makes a sound. Low. Wounded.

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

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

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

You pull your hand back.

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

“No,” he breathes. “Please. No, no.”

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

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

“BB.”

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

You can barely speak. “BB. Stop.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

His agony written on his face in light.

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

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

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

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

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

Letting go.

His hand lifts from your shoulder.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You stop.

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

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

You turn and look behind you.

The corridor is empty.

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

He's gone.

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

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

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

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

You step through.

“please,” he begs over the phone, “i’ll be good i swear. i’ll stop fighting just let me come home.”

from his tone you could tell he was just done crying and it just sounded pathetically beautiful.

“this is not your home. this is my house.” you coo as you stir your dinner. “stop calling me dex.”

you hang up without listening to the rest of his pleading. though less than 10 minutes later, he’s at your front door, begging again.

“baby,” eyes red and puffy, “i need you, i can’t breathe without you. please, please, don’t cut me off again, just—” he breathes as he ghosts his arm by your shoulders like he’s asking for permission. “can i please stay?”

you sigh and let him inside the house. he silently walks in, muttering a quiet thank you as he passes you. as soon as you close door and turn, dex is already on his knees.

“what the hell are you doing dex?”

dropping to his knees, his hands caress the backs of your thighs, dropping his head and burying it between them. gripping you tightly like he could bare letting go. “please take me back. nothing is good without you and it’s making me fucking sick, please,” practically blubbering at this point.

he was so strong and his biceps wrapped around you effortlessly. you could feel the strength just radiating off of him always, like an ever glowing essence.

you sigh, hand touching the nape of his neck and travelling up through his hair while he hums in contentment, “please stand up.”

the sound that he makes was teetering the line of desperation and relief. his lips press against the plush of your thigh while his hands rise to cup your ass. with your hand still buried in his hair, you pull him up with a slight tug, trying to get him to stand. though he keeps slowly rising, kissing up your side and dancing over your stomach, the fabric rising with every movement. a soft gasp escapes your lips and his touch slides up your spine, a shiver running through you. he stops just by your neck when you tug his hair harder and he hisses your name though one would argue it was a moan. you shove him gently and tell him to sit down, though you knew he could’ve stopped you.

you tend to his wounds and wipe his face and he watches you the whole time with puppy eyes. you share your dinner with him but you don’t touch again then, he only steals glances between bites.

within the span of an hour he’s inching closer to you on the couch and he’s watching you when he thinks you’re not looking. no one really cares about the news playing on the television as it repeats something about the AVTF.

his heavy hand rests just under your chest as he pulls you in and buries his nose in your hair, taking a long deep breath in. memorizing your scent like it gave him life.

by the end of night dex is situated between your legs, groaning like it hurts to part from you. he whispers soft thank you’s like he’s grateful for this meal you’ve provided. pushing your legs up higher over his head while you pant and squirm. but dex takes more control then, ignoring your pleas to slow down and dragging you closer to his mouth. maw slack and relentless as he laps and teases. his strong arms wrap and hook around your thighs. tongue teasing the sensitive bud for what felt like eternity. you’ll push his head away to no avail, weakly spent as you attempt it.

“dex, enough. i can’t,” you pant, voice bordering on barely concealed exhaustion and blissful satisfaction.

he shakes his head against you and that only makes you gasp again, throwing your head back.

“not until you promise hmm?” he says between his drunken moans, “you can’t leave me.”

crying out from overstimulating pleasure you nod, “okay, fuck— i won’t. you can stay.”

looking up at you through his hooded eyes, he smiles with them before kissing your inner thigh. he leaves gentle kisses to let you cool off, letting the feeling subside for barely a minute before diving right back into his ministrations. he lets you squeeze yours legs around his head and writhe as you say his name.

“now really try to suffocate me with these,” he says as he squeezes your thighs harder around his neck, turning his head to bite the plush of your thighs.

you know you’ll let him in again. you’ll always let him come back. maybe one day you’ll tell him how you follow him too.

“I did it to protect you.” 

The words ring in your ears, echoing again and again in your mind, refusing to slip away into oblivion. Engraved into your brain, in a perfect loop as they keep repeating themselves. 

You can hear the words as if Dex is still repeating them into your ear, frantic and hurried, his voice laced with panic as his fingers dig so deep into your forearm that it hurt.

Even though it’s been hours, those words absolutely refuse to disappear, insisting on haunting you.

Your brain can’t let go of the imagery of the man on the ground either, dead eyes wide open and blood leaking out from where the bullet had lodged right at the center of his throat. The sound of him gurgling blood and the heaving breaths. That’s something you’re not sure it’ll ever leave your mind. 

“... sir, please, you have to let us do our job.”

“I’m not stopping you, am I? All I’m saying is that I wanna be there. She needs me, can’t you see that, she’s…”

The argument reaches your ears despite your attempts to block it out.

From where you’re seated alone in the waiting room of the police station, you can both see and listen to the heated discussion Dex has been having with the detectives for the past fifteen minutes, just outside. Part of you is glad for the distance. 

A couple more minutes go by before an officer comes to fetch you. 

You’re taken to an interrogation room, where a man and a woman are already seated opposite to you. She introduces herself as an FBI agent while the man is NYP detective. When you take a seat on the uncomfortable metal chair, they begin to talk. “We’d just like to go over a few things, if you’re okay with that. It’s very important.” 

The man shuffles through some papers before he speaks again, not waiting for your answer. 

“According to agent Poindexter, you two were approached in the street by an unknown man while you were running errands. Is that correct?”

You nod and he slides a photo towards you.

It’s strange to see that guy - alive and with color in his cheeks, instead of morbidly pale and blood gushing out of him. He looks young. Younger than you thought. 

“And this man, you had absolutely no idea who he was? Never met him before?”

Your voice is small, so small it might disappear into thin air. “No.”

“Alright. And what happened after he approached you?”

You swallow with difficulty, fingers fidgeting the hem of your shirt.

“He… uh, he asked for money. Demanded it. S-said we needed to give him our wallets and phones and jewelry.”

The detective nods, encouraging you to continue. “And then what happened?” 

“We didn’t have anything with us. So when we didn’t give him anything, he… he got aggressive and then he took out a knife from the inside of his jacket.” It’s strange to put what happened into such simple words when in reality, the fear you felt at the sight of the shiny metal is something you might never forget.

You force yourself to continue. 

“Dex tried to calm him down. The man was really scaring me, he was so close and I thought he was gonna use the knife to hurt us.” you bite your lip, tasting the metallic taste as it opens up. 

The woman, FBI Special Agent Fiora, takes over. 

“And that’s when agent Poindexter grabbed his own gun?”

“Yeah.”

The woman presses on. “And the attacker didn’t surrender at that?”

“I… No.”

The woman smiles at you, angling her head in the slightest. “You’re telling me a man armed with only a knife refused to back down when a gun was pulled out?” 

She knows. She must know or else why would she be asking these questions. You gulp, sweat beading in the back of your neck. 

“That’s what happened.” your voice sounds fragile, breakable even to your own ears. 

“Alright. If that’s what you say happened.” the agent echoes you. “So, just to make things clear, what you’re saying is that agent Pointdexter did attempt to diffuse the situation before using lethal force.”

You hesitate for a second, before nodding. “Yes, he tried.”

“Verbally?”

“Yes.”

That’s not a lie, you tell yourself. Not entirely, at least.

Dex tried. In the beginning, after he had pushed you to stand behind him he tried to talk, to calm the guy down. But only for a very brief moment before he completely gave up, pulled out his gun and shot the other guy right in his throat, making him bleed out to death. 

“And only when the attacker didn’t surrender did he shoot the man. In self-defence. Is that correct?”

You lie with all the teeth you got. “Yes.”

–

“I did it to protect you.” 

Dex stands next to the bathroom sink, hovering over you as you rub cleanser all over your face twice, as if that would erase everything from your brain.

It doesn’t and you can still see everything clearly as if it happened just moments ago: the red blood pooling underneath the fallen body dripping from the hole in his throat, the red splatters staining your clothes. You hand-washed them three times, scrubbing them as best as you could with a mix of baking soda and water, but there’s little hope for them. The damage is already done and the stains won’t leave. That was your favorite shirt. 

Dex refuses to leave the bathroom, standing with his arms crossed as he watches you pat your face dry with a towel and proceed with your usual skincare routine. He got inside while you were halfway through a very long shower and hasn’t left since, determined to stay posted near you. 

“I did it to protect you.” he repeats again, frustration seeping into his voice, when you are done moisturizing your face. 

“I know.” 

“Then why can’t you even look me in the eyes?” 

The words come out more aggressively than you expected and your breathing turns sharp. 

“It’s not like that.” the fragility in your voice is nothing compared to the energy in his. 

He pushes for an answer, crowding your space. “Then what’s it like?” 

You hesitate for a long moment, unsure if this is a conversation you are ready to have right now. Sharing your feelings is something you tend to avoid, especially when unsure of the depth of what you’re experiencing. 

But Dex won’t back down, you know it. He’s determined to get the words out of your mouth and he won’t be satisfied until you do. 

“You killed someone.” 

Despite the reluctance with which you spoke the words, your boyfriend reacts as if you dropped a bomb on him. His face tenses up, an upset scowl taking shape. He exhales, although it sounds more like a breathless chuckle. 

“I’m FBI swat. What do you think a sniper does?”

“I know that.”

Dex scoffs. “It doesn’t look like it, then. You’re acting as if I’m the bad guy here when all I did was protect you. I saved your life and you’re behaving like you can’t even stand to be near me, like I’m a monster you can’t wait to leave.”

You turn to him, hurt. “That’s not true.”

“Right.” he scoffs again. 

You look away from him, uneasy at how defensive he is. Dex doesn’t allow the silence to stretch for too long before he’s back into vicious attack. 

“Then what is it? Tell me. I wanna know.” he demands, volume rising. “Wanna know why you’re behaving like this if it’s not me and what I did.”

You bite your lip, risking a glance through the mirror. He’s becoming jittery now, shifting his weight from one leg to the other and then back again, the skin from his face slightly dewy. Like he’s about to have an anxiety attack. Or worse. 

So you cave in, stomach spinning wildly. Turning around, you face him. 

“You didn’t give him a chance, Dex.” you quietly utter. 

Ben looks at you, brows pushed together.

“You just shot him.” you whisper, voice breaking as you recall the events from earlier. “You didn’t give him a warning or a chance to surrender or try to disarm him or anything like that. You… You just took the shot and killed him. And the more I think about it, maybe that wasn’t-”

“I did it to protect you!” Dex spits, redness stinging his face. “He was gonna hurt you and I couldn’t let that happen, I couldn’t let him get to you.”

“You had a gun, Dex. All he had was a knife.”

“A knife he was ready to use.”

“He would’ve backed down if you had given him the chance to but you didn’t.” you fire back, composure breaking. Blinking furiously to keep the tears tat begin to clog up your eyes. “You didn’t have to kill him, Dex. That wasn’t necessary-”

“Yeah, well, maybe I wanted to.” Dex shouts, booming voice overpowering yours. He closes his hand into a fist, a shadow of something dark and dangerous looming in his eyes. “Did that cross your mind? That maybe I wanted to kill him. It cost me nothing to pull the trigger and watch him bleed out and I’d gladly do it again.”

Your heart sinks. His confession makes you nauseous in more ways than one and your hand reaches for the basin, gripping it hard until your knuckles are white. 

“...what?” 

“And who cares if he died? He was a criminal, a scumbag. One less of those breathing and the world keeps spinning just fine.”

Somehow it’s the flat tone that upsets you the most, even if the words aren’t far behind. Clearly your ears are not working well or perhaps you’re having a hallucination, a sign of post-traumatic stress or whatever it was that the medic told you after the quick examination at the police station.

Because this can’t be Dex.

He doesn’t talk like this, doesn’t behave like this. 

“Dex, you don’t mean that.” you gently say. “This isn’t you. It was a long day and you’re tired.” 

Dex scowls, shaking his head with a bitter chuckle. 

“Yeah, you know me so well, don’t you.”

The words land poorly and you press your lips together, trying to keep yourself together. A cold, bad feeling begins to take root.

Leaving Dex behind, you return to the room. Something breaks in the small bathroom, violently shattering against the floor and you wince. This isn’t going to work out, not until Dex calms down and you don’t believe that’ll happen anytime soon, judging from his behavior. So you make your choice. 

At the sound of a zipper bag being open and the shuffling of clothes, Dex comes out with water sprinkled on his face and tousled hair.  

“What’re doing?”

You hesitate for a second, “...I think maybe I should go spend the night at my parent’s.” 

You hurry up in shoving clothes into the small overnight bag but even with your back to him, you can hear the upset sound Dex lets out. 

“You’re ditching me?” he questions you. 

“Dex.” your voice comes out tired, small. Exactly how you feel. “I’ll come back tomorrow, but I think it’s best if we sleep apart tonight. Just for tonight, Dex.”

You’re not sure if you’re telling the truth or not. 

The silence that follows is unsettling. Dex doesn’t argue or shout like you’re half-expecting him too, he doesn’t break or throw things around the room. In reality, he makes no sound other than his raged breathing and you don’t dare to turn around and face him.

When you finally stuff the last shirt into the bag and get ready to zip it close, strong arms wrap themselves around your torso. You’re taken by surprise as Dex holds onto you tightly, face brusquely mushed in the crook of your neck. 

“Don’t go.”

Wetness damps your shoulder as he exhales shakily.

“Dex-”

“Please, don’t leave. I-I’m sorry.” he attempts, lips pressed against your skin. “Fuck, I messed up, I know that but please…”

“Listen, you’re right - I’m tired and it’s been a long day and I took it out on you, but please, I didn’t mean to.” Dex pleads, arms tightening around you. “I’ll apologize as much as you want me to, but don’t… don’t go. You’re all I have left and if you leave, I’ll have no one.” 

His words, teary and frantic, chip away your composure. You know he doesn't have any living family left. For all you know he doesn’t even have friends, only work colleagues with whom he’s not close at all. All of this makes it harder to leave.

If you pack your things and leave for the night, you’ll go to your parent’s house. Your mom will comfort you with sweet words and cook your favorite food while your dad is going to kiss your forehead and offer to pay for some self-defense classes.

You’ll be comforted and taken care of, but what about Dex? Are you really going to leave him to struggle on his own when he is the only reason you’re still alive and standing?

“I didn’t mean it. What I said earlier, I didn’t mean it. It was bullshit, alright?” he continues.

You sigh tiredly. “You can’t just say stuff like that, Dex, it wasn’t nice.” 

“I know. I know, you’re right. I won’t say it ever again. I promise. Just, please, don’t leave. Okay?”

A beat goes by and you hear the sounds of your resolve shattering down. 

Your shared apartment was always the quietest during the late afternoon, the sharp horizon of the Hell’s Kitchen skyline throwing long, stark shadows across the hardwood floor. For Dex, silence was usually a dangerous variable. It was the space where the static in his head grew too loud, where the meticulous, rigid architecture of his internal programming began to fray at the edges.

But lately, the silence had a different rhythm. It was punctuated by the soft, rhythmic click of your platform heels, the crinkle of cellophane, and the bright, unbothered melody of your voice.

Dex sat rigidly at the kitchen island, his long legs extended, his large, calloused hands resting flat on the clean counter space. His cold blue eyes were fixed entirely on you. Specifically, they were fixed on the bright pastel shopping bag you had dumped unceremoniously onto the table.

He didn't really understand your apparent attachment to inanimate objects. He himself never really got this overwhelming need to like something so much that you needed multiple versions of it. To Dex, an object possessed utility, or it was clutter. The closest comparable thing he had to such notions were his weapons. His pristine, balanced throwing knives and his standard-issue sidearm. But his constant need to replace or maintain them was born entirely out of lethal necessity, a calculation of survival and structural order. It wasn't born out of consumerism. It wasn't born out of... fun.

You had always known there was something a little off with your boyfriend beyond just his severe diagnosed obsessive-compulsive tendencies. Dex didn't just struggle to understand human emotions; he viewed them like a foreign dialect that required constant, exhausting translation. When feelings did pierce through his armor, they didn't come naturally or easily. They came like a flash flood. It was a hard, beautifully dangerous lesson you had learned early on in your relationship: when Dex loved, he loved hard, with his entire fractured being. You were the center of his world, his absolute everything, the singular gravity well keeping his violent impulses from spinning into total chaos.

So, whatever you liked, Dex tried to accept. He tried really, really hard to get it.

Even your insatiable hunger to keep collecting these stupid, overpriced little things.

"It's a collection, Dex," you had corrected him a few days prior, your lips pulling into a frown because he had worded your hobby far too seriously during a debrief of the apartment’s organization.

Dex reached out, his large fingers gingerly picking up one of the pastel boxes you had on the table. His sharp brows furrowed into a tight knot of absolute concentration, his gaze drilling into the cardboard as if the colorful text on the side held the answer to the universe's deepest, most classified secret. His eyes scanned the bright, cartoonish characters. He didn't understand the appeal of the molded plastic or the soft fabric, but he knew the sheer sight of the packaging made your eyes crinkle at the corners.

It's stupid, the first, rigid voice in his head screamed, a remnant of the sterile Bureau evaluations that dictated what a grown, lethal operative should care about. But he didn't voice it outright. Instead, he kept his jaw set, his large palm sinking back into the bag to pull out the remaining boxes. Four more, exactly. He lined them up in a flawless, perfectly symmetrical sequence, exactly one inch apart from one another.

"But you don't know what you're getting," he said, his gravelly voice carrying a trace of genuine, slight astonishment. The concept of a "blind box" genuinely offended his sense of structural logic. He did the math in his head instantly, the probabilities, the margins of error, the high likelihood of wasted capital. To willingly take your chances on losing was gambling. This was gambling. You were gambling.

"That's the fun part!" you gleamed, your face lighting up as you snatched the first box. "You cross your fingers and hope for the best!"

Dex blinked, his gaze tracing the soft curve of your cheek. Bless your heart. You were always so effortlessly optimistic about everything, moving through the grime of Hell’s Kitchen with a radiant, unbothered lightness that felt entirely unaligned with the dark realities he dealt in. Your light was one of the things he admired most about you; it was the exact gravity that had pulled him away from his old, suffocating scripts and to you.

But as his eyes dropped back down to the five boxes sitting on the kitchen table, his mind had already weighed out the bleak chances of getting one or two duplicates. Immediately, a heavy dread dropped in his chest and his heart tightened. You would be so disappointed. That brilliant, blinding smile he loved seeing on your face would falter, and he knew you would force it back on just to keep him from worrying. Dex took an involuntary step forward, his hand twitching slightly as your manicured fingers tore into the first cardboard flap. Part of him wanted to physically stop you, to intervene before the statistics failed you. Words of clumsy reassurance were already at the tip of his tongue.

But as you kept opening them, the expected disappointment never materialized. Instead, your excitement only got louder and louder, a bright, melodic laugh breaking free from your throat as your smile grew exponentially bigger.

And your eyes... oh, your beautiful eyes that he loved looking into when you were flushed and breathless beneath him in the dark, they just sparkled. They were brilliant, shining so bright under the kitchen lights as you held each tiny figurine up to his face in rapid succession. To his utter surprise, the math had defied itself. You hadn't gotten a single repeat. Not one duplicate of the plush and plastic crap you were currently cradling against your chest as if they were your own flesh and blood.

As you stood there in the middle of the dining room, fawning over your new things in your cutest, softest mini dress, something inside Dex’s brain clicked into place with a definitive snap.

He liked seeing you like that. He liked it with a fierce, possessive intensity that thrummed right beneath his skin. You looked so good-hearted, so completely light and positive, as if the outside world had never once touched you, or as if your own complicated past had never possessed the power to harden your edges. For the fleeting moment you spent opening up those useless boxes, the immense stress and the heavy burdens he knew you carried, the constant fear of the world taking him away from you, were entirely gone.

Dex’s posture straightened, his broad shoulders squaring as his eyes remained trained on you, tracking the way you carefully assessed each plush keychain. He decided then and there, with the absolute finality of a new directive, that he would do everything in his power to give you that gift again. That one small, unvarnished moment where you weren't worried about the government finding him, or the cops kicking down the door, or the bloody ledger he was constantly balancing. A moment where all you did was show him your new keychains.

Throughout the following week, Dex found your new companions absolutely everywhere.

His hyper-fixated eyes mapped them into the spatial layout of your shared life. One was hung carefully on your car keys, rattling against the ignition switch. Two were clipped to the straps of your favorite handbags. One was positioned on the nightstand by your shared bed, its glassy, unblinking stare oriented toward the pillows, while the fifth hung out in the living room, perched symmetrically on the edge of the bookshelf.

Every single time your eyes landed on them, Dex would catch the subtle, beautiful transformation of your features. The way your day got just a little bit brighter, your shoulders relaxing because you felt like you had a tiny, familiar companion with you everywhere you went.

And that was precisely where the thoughts started.

It happened late one Thursday evening. The city outside was a muted blur of rain and distant sirens, but inside the bedroom, the atmosphere was thick, warm, and entirely spent from lust. You were fast asleep, your soft bare frame curled tightly against the broad, heavily muscled expanse of Dex’s chest. Your breathing deep and even as you slumbered in content. Dex remained wide awake, his large arm anchored around your waist, holding you with a protective, unyielding grip. He was exhausted, his body thoroughly satiated, but his mind refused to slip into the quiet.

Instead, his eyes were locked onto the small plush keychain sitting on the nightstand.

He stared at it through the deep shadows of the room, his unblinking gaze drilling into the toy for minutes on end. It was a tiny, ridiculous creature with dead, empty eyes decorated with cheap glitter. In the silence of the night, the ideas began to organize themselves within his brain, assembling with the clean flawless precision of a blueprint.

And low, decisive, albeit highly amused scoff escaped his lips, vibrating faintly against your hair.

"Open it," he said the following evening, his voice a cool, steady register as he precisely slid a brand-new, sealed pastel box across the dinner table, presenting it to you like a trophy.

You immediately pushed aside your half-eaten plate of pasta, your eyes locking onto the packaging with a gasp. You instantly launched into a frantic, excited explanation about how this was a completely new series you hadn't even seen online yet, turning the cardboard over in your hands and excitedly pointing to the specific, rare character you wanted.

Dex watched you, a pleased, thoroughly satisfied smirk gracing his sharp features. He knew exactly which one you would pick, of course. He was profoundly satisfied with his own knowledge of your desires. What you didn't know was that he had spent over an hour at the specialty store that afternoon as he used his awareness and knowledge of manufacturing data to subtly weigh and measure the boxes, calculating the serial codes to fish out the exact plush you wanted.

Your face lit up as the wrapping tore away, and you began to preen over the stuffed keychain, gushing about how it was a "winter moth" and holding it up right next to your cheek to compare the size. Dex’s smile remained fixed, his blue eyes locking onto the toy's face as a sick, intoxicating sense of delight flooded through his chest.

He had spent hours meticulously replacing the plush's cheap glitter eyes with a high-definition pinhole camera.

You loved your little companions so much that you took them everywhere. They sat on your bags, they went to the market, they sat on the dashboard of your car. If you were going to carry them into the world, Dex reasoned, he might as well utilize them in his permanent, singular mission to keep you safe. If he couldn't be by your side every second of the day to neutralize any threat that dared look at you, his eyes would be there instead.

You stood up from your seat, completely oblivious to the surveillance matrix in your hands, and rushed over to his side of the table. You plopped down happily onto his lap, wrapping your arms around his large frame as a torrent of sweet, breathless thank-yous spilled from your lips.

"You're welcome. Anything for my girl," he muttered into your skin, his deep voice vibrating against your neck as he breathed in the scent of your perfume. His large hand moved to stroke your hair, though his cold, calculating gaze remained locked entirely on the plush in your hands, watching the tiny lens catch the light.

Over the next few weeks, the project became a quiet, methodical obsession. Dex worked tirelessly in the late hours while you slept, using his surgical precision to dismantle, modify, and re-stitch every single plush keychain you brought home. Some were significantly harder than others; certain characters had asymmetric eyes or mobile fabric features, but his hyper-focused mind always engineered a solution.

Every new box you brought home was no longer just clutter to him. It was a new soldier in his private, invisible army.

You had come to understand his sudden, intense interest in your collection in your own sweet way. You hadn't picked up on a single shred of the darker, deeply possessive intent behind his involvement, simply assuming it was just Dex being his supportive, loving self, learning to participate in the things that made you happy.

"I want this one because it looks like you in your suit," you murmured day, your finger tracing a tiny, brooding character on the back of a new box.

Dex froze for a fraction of a second, his jaw tightening as he stared at the little drawing. He had to physically force his hands to remain flat on the counter, actively restraining himself from reaching across the space, pulling you against his chest, and smothering you with the sheer, unadulterated weight of his affection.

That was by far the sweetest, most devastating thing you had ever said to him. You wanted to carry a miniature version of him around in your pocket.

Little did you know, you had already been carrying him everywhere you went.

Dex knew according to the scripts of normal society, that he should probably feel a semblance of guilt or shame for what he had done. He was monitoring your every movement, cataloging every street corner you turned, mapping every face that came within five feet of you through the dead eyes of your keychains. But truthfully, as he looked at you, all he felt was an absolute, pure sense of satisfaction.

You loved your messed-up killer boyfriend, that he had no doubt. But Dex had a very distinct feeling that you didn't truly know the terrifying extent of how far he would go to protect you. You didn't know how truly, beautifully ruined he actually was. He had been very, very careful to keep certain aspects of his obsessive nature hidden from you, having learned the hard way from Julie and the bloody disasters of his past.

So he held his breath, his blue eyes tracking your fingers as you eagerly tore the cardboard open in anticipation.

But as the plastic wrap came away, your face fell. The familiar, bright excitement dropped from your features. You hadn't gotten the one you wanted. You hadn't gotten him.

"Oh... that's okay," you said softly, your voice carrying a brave but disappointed little lilt as you lifted the plush up by its metal ring. "This one kinda looks like me! So it's okay."

Dex’s eyes hardened instantly, the blue in his irises turning to chips of ice as a brand-new, unyielding directive programmed itself into his brain. No other options. Not when you wanted him. And only him.

It took him exactly two days to correct the mistake.

The bedroom was bathed in the lazy, amber glow of the late afternoon sun, the heat thick and comforting. You were leaning back against the headboard, a blissful thoroughly fucked out smile on your face as you ran your fingers through Dex's short hair. He was resting heavily between your legs, his broad shoulder blades pressing against your thighs, his head pillowed softly on your bare stomach. His large, calloused hand was moving in a slow, lazy rhythm up and down the soft skin of your thigh, his touch possessing a quiet, grounded familiarity. Dex tilted his head up, his sharp jawline tracing against your skin as his eyes locked onto yours.

"Got a gift for you," he nodded, his gravelly voice dropping into a low, quiet register.

"You have a gift for me?" you asked, instantly sitting up. Your body was thoroughly sore and beautifully spent but your eyes were wide and eager.

Dex offered a single, precise nod. Reaching down with one long arm, his hand slid beneath the edge of the bedframe, where he had kept the thing hidden in the shadows for the past twelve hours. When his large palms unfurled, revealing the object within, your heart completely melted.

It was the exact plush you had wanted from the box. The one that looked like his suit.

Except, it wasn't standard factory issue anymore. Dex had spent hours straight meticulously altering the fabric with tools. A miniature, flawlessly stitched dark blue mask now covered the doll's entire face, the infamous Bullseye emblem embroidered perfectly over the forehead. Branding the little creature entirely as his. He had even crafted a ridiculously adorable, functional leather gun holster and a microscopic tactical knife belt, fastening them securely around the plush's waist.

You had to physically clamp a hand over your mouth to stop yourself from letting out a loud, embarrassing scream of pure adoration. Your six-foot, deadly, globally wanted assassin lover had just spent his free time customizing a tiny, soft doll to look exactly like his alter-ego, just to make you smile.

You were barely keeping your composure together, your eyes misting with affection, before Dex’s expression shifted, taking on a rigid, deeply serious alignment.

"There's more," he nodded, his voice entirely deadpan.

With a smooth, deliberate twist of his large fingers, Dex gripped the plush's head and popped it cleanly off the torso, exposing a gleaming, three-inch black metal dagger hidden inside the stuffed body.

Your jaw dropped half an inch, completely speechless as the tiny, lethal blade caught the sunlight.

"I need to know that you always have something to protect yourself with when I'm not with you," Dex nodded firmly, his tone carrying the absolute unyielding weight of a universal law.

He held the decapitated head of the plush, which now served as the textured handle for the hidden dagger, waiting for your reaction.

For a fraction of a second, the silence in the room stretched. Dex’s fingers tensed against the grip, an instinctual, raw anxiety flaring in his chest. Was it too much? Had he crossed a line? Did his unrefined, violent nature finally freak you out? His hand began to instinctively lower, preparing to hide the weapon away in the shadows again, his internal self scrambling to find a script to fix the mistake.

But before he could retreat, a loud, unbridled laugh broke free from your lips.

"This is the absolute cutest thing you have ever done!" you exclaimed, leaning forward to snatch the modified plush from his hands, cradling it as if it were a priceless, irreplaceable artifact.

Dex froze, his sharp brows furrowing slightly as he processed the reaction. "So... you like it?..." he asked, his voice cautious, parsing the data.

"I love it! It's so adorable, oh my god—" You covered your mouth to shield a genuine gasp, your fingers already tracing the tiny leather straps of the knife belt, completely enchanted by the detail.

Dex let out a slow, quiet breath, the tension leaving his broad shoulders as he leaned back against your legs. A dark, thoroughly proud and satisfied smile spread across his scarred face, his blue eyes crinkling with a deep, unsettling fondness as he watched you toy with the miniature version of his executioner suit.

You leaned down, pressing a sweet, lingering kiss against his lips, murmuring about how lucky you were to have such a supportive, protective boyfriend. Dex leaned into the touch, his large hand wrapping around your waist to pull you closer, his thumb stroking your skin in perfect, rhythmic intervals.

He didn't say a word about the micro-camera embedded into the center of the stitched target on the doll's forehead. He didn't mention the encrypted feed currently streaming directly to his private monitor, or the fact that the tiny soldiers on your other bags were currently capturing every angle of the room. You were completely blissful, entirely safe within the bright, happy parameters of your collection. You didn't know the terrifying depth of his sickness, and as Dex laid his head on you, listening to your soft laughter fill the quiet apartment, he knew he was never going to let you find out.

A/N:

⊹ he has a habit of invading your personal space whenever he feels uncertain. arguments end with him standing far too close, searching your face for any sign that you’re about to walk away. if you try to leave the room to cool off, he instinctively follows.

it isn’t about intimidation as much as desperation. distance makes him anxious in ways he doesn’t understand, so he closes it physically, lingering within arm’s reach until you finally look back at him.

⊹ after hurting you emotionally, dex watches your expression change in real time - the confusion first, then hurt, then the disappointment that settles over your face and for one brief second he wishes he could pull every word back.

eventually he speaks so softly you almost miss it. “I didn’t want you to look at me like that.” it isn’t quite an apology, but it’s as close as he knows how to come, and the guilt in his expression lingers long after the words are gone.

⊹ dex also has a habit of pushing you away the moment he needs you most. on days when his mind is loud and nothing feels stable, he becomes cold, dismissive, almost cruel, as though making you leave on his own terms would hurt less than waiting for you to do it.

later, dex finds you sitting alone with red eyes and realizes he was the reason. he opens his mouth to apologize, then closes it again. every sentence sounds inadequate before he can even say it, and the silence stretches until it’s the only thing left in the room.

⊹ if you tell him, “you really hurt me,” something in him visibly falters. dex doesn’t argue or defend himself. he just stares at you with an expression that’s almost blank, except for the guilt creeping in around the edges.

he spends the rest of the night lingering nearby, picking up objects and putting them back down without purpose, wanting to fix what he broke but having absolutely no idea how.

⊹ after particularly bad arguments, he avoids mirrors. he doesn’t like seeing his own reflection when all he can think about is the look on your face as you tried not to cry in front of him.

when he finally comes back to you, the apology never sounds right. “I didn’t mean it,” he says quietly, and both of you know intent doesn’t erase impact. you nod because you believe he regrets it, but the hurt remains anyway.

⊹ when he feels abandoned, even over something small, he doesn’t ask for reassurance. he punishes you with distance. your messages go unanswered, eye contact disappears, affection vanishes, and he lets you wonder what you did wrong until you’re the one chasing after him.

by the time he finally speaks again, you’re exhausted from trying to fix a problem you never created. he watches you apologize with an empty feeling in his chest, knowing he manipulated the entire situation and hating himself for needing that proof you would stay.

⊹ dex doesn’t usually come looking for you with a perfect apology. instead, he sits outside the bedroom door for hours, listening to the silence on the other side. by the time he finally knocks, his voice is barely audible. “I know you’re awake.”

when you open the door, he looks nothing like the man you know. his shoulders are tense, his eyes refuse to meet yours. dex doesn’t ask you to forgive him. seeing the hesitation in your face is enough to understand that trust isn’t something he can demand back after breaking it.

⊹ the first time you flinch after dex raises his voice during an argument - he notices instantly. the expression on his face changes so fast it’s almost painful to watch.

he goes completely silent, takes a step backward to give you space, and spends the rest of the evening speaking so gently that it’s obvious he’s replaying that moment over and over in his head.

⊹ there are nights when dex wakes from a nightmare and instinctively reaches for your side of the bed. if you’re there and you let him hold your hand, he doesn’t say anything at all. he simply keeps his fingers wrapped around yours until the sun rises.

he stares into the darkness with his thumb absently brushing over your knuckles before whispering, so quietly you almost miss it, “I’m sorry.” when you turn to look at him, his eyes stay fixed on your joined hands. “for all of it.” the words come out unevenly, and when you gently squeeze his hand back, his grip tightens with relief.