clumsycopy

There’s no response. Your voice echoes down the hall and nothing more. Just four walls opening up into another four by four set of walls. And it's endless.

Anxiety rises in your stomach enough to pin you to the floor, and your legs are like jelly but you stumble forward. Only to realise, they’re both gone. You didn’t move a muscle, you had been stood right in between them, and now they’d just vanished into thin air. Or maybe you did? There was no telling, because this place was off ever since you’d first been pulled into it.

—

The first hour, Bobby is convinced he'll find you quickly. This place can only be so big right? And he hasn't moved that far, he’s sure of it. Apart from how the rooms started getting darker, and how he doesn't recognise anything, from the way he ran when you disappeared from his sight.

Smart thinking Bobby.. 

He shouts your name everywhere he goes, step after step around empty corners that leave a pit in his stomach and turning his head just to check behind him. There’s shadows, moving ones, like silhouettes, and every once in a while it almost looks like you. Clark didn't give much of an explanation to this place, or why he needed you both for research, but now he regretted it all.

Especially dragging you into this place with him, pulling you through that weird invisible space in the wall when you didn’t want to go.

The guilt eats at him more than the bile rising in his throat, and he’s certain he’s not that high, that even if he was it would have worn off by now. If you were together he could protect you, at least be near you and keep an eye, now you could be anywhere. With Clark, by yourself..

It wasn't like the outside, or like some underground office space it pretended to be, because that's what it was, pretend. Like it didn't know what it was, as if it was still figuring that out, like it was alive.

His fingers press into the buttons of his camera, the viewfinder lighting up his face in a flash of colour. And he rewinds the recordings he'd made sure to film every hour you were in the place, marking everything that was pointed out. He looks for some kind of blue, maybe even to ground himself he’s not sure, but he needs to see something.

The first recording was when you first went through, the clicking of the camera turning on jsut as the video comes into view. Half of his arm reaches through the wall until it disappears, and he laughs behind it, in disbelief. You’d seen it like out the other end, standing in the dim light of Clark’s store with your heart pounding in your chest.

Bobby had only looked at it in a nervous wonder, turning his arm over and back again, shoving it back to him just to reach it back out to you. His voice was shaking as the camera zoomed into his arm.

"Babe.. hey check this out—"

"Bobby where are you?'

"Go through the door.. it's safe.." Clark’s voice calls out behind him, the camera turning to face him slinging his backpack on, just enough before he faces back to the wall.

“I don’t know about this.”

“Just grab my hand.. I’m here.”

His voice again, and he calms, urging you on eagerly. Stupidly. And you do it, you listen, the film picked it up too. Your hand in his, his fingers curling around yours as he leads you to where he and Clark stand. Yellow rooms, off white carpets, and the faint smell of mould.

The next lot of them he flicks through, every passing corridor, every dumb joke he made to lighten the mood, every snag of the camera when something caught his eye. Shoes half inside of the floor. A t-shirt he remembered someone wearing once. Gull feathers scattered along the floor and black, tacky footprints. A lot of them.

All things that made no sense to be in there, to the way they were place.

The most recent tape was when you were all split up. The static buzzed louder on this one, the film jumps when the lights flicker, like when a radio loses signal, like the three of you had gone too far. The camera lands on you first, your face a contrast from the damp walls and darkness around you, something almost light around you in comparison. Bobby had a habit of doing that, capturing you on film and framing you just right so you'd be centre, the glowing, beautiful standout amid the drab background.

But this was different. He couldn't see you. He could see what was you. The same clothes you put on that morning in your apartment, shrugged on when clark had pounded on the door. The way your hair fell in your face, the small smile you gave him even though he still saw the nervousness in your eyes. But it was wrong, off, like something just highlighted your point on a map. And he keeps rewinding it just to see if his eyes are playing some sort of trick. 

There’s a glitch across your face. One that distorts your smile and leaves it crooked, and then there’s a high pitched sound, a screech so loud it nearly makes him drop the camera in a clatter on the floor. 

It fumbles in his hands before he catches it, closing the viewfinder with the clutch of his fingers. His breathing grows heavier and he dares to take another look. Because that was only hours ago, an untouched tape, and somehow it’s been messed with.

—

The worst part about this place is how it learns.

It remembers every detail. The voices started off distorted and wrong, using his voice in ways you didn't recognise. Everything was too over pronounced, the teasing and the way he dropped his accent was gone. You could ignore it then. Now it knew him, as much as it seemed to know how to get under your skin.

The laughter came next, and now it follows you in an echo down the hall, it even waits when you turn a corner before it stops again. You figure you can outrun it, pace yourself a few corridors down before it grows distant, but it comes again, louder and clearer. Right behind the wall where you’ve hid yourself hoping to regain some of your breath back.

It’s not nervous, it's real. And it’s Bobby’s laugh. The kind of laugh he does when clark made him reshoot commercials over and over, or the one he has only with you when you're both high and lounging in bed. It sounds so much like him it hurts, you can almost see the toothy grin come across his face.

So you test it again. This time you don’t run, you chase.You get up and follow it through three hallways, then four, then five. But it keeps moving away, always just ahead and never close enough to reach. Like it’s now mimicking you.

It keeps repeating like a recording stuck on loop, you haven't heard between the laughs. It’s not human, and it’s not him. Whatever it is, is something to taunt you, and you can feel the eyes of it on you, everywhere.

—

"Bobby.. bobby where are you I can't see you?" He jumps at the sound of your voice quicker than he can place himself, rising to his feet 

"It's okay baby I'm here—" You sound so tired and upset. And then it's worse. He can hear you crying. But he can't he can't see you. He's checking rooms, frantically, and he's shouting. Unpicking every lock from every door, hollowing out the crawlspace between the smaller rooms until they open up, near stumbling over himself just to follow the trail of it.

"Where the fuck.." He's expecting you to appear around the corner, where the sobs are louder, so shrill they ring in his ears. You’ve stopped calling out to him, instead there’s just sound, almost like groaning, broken and muffled by cries, animalistic in the way it distorts.

He knows you well enough to know that’s not you. He’s held you time after time when you’re upset, the times when you’ve been mad at him, curling into his chest after an argument even if you push him away first, or collapsing into his arms after a long day at work. This sound is hollow, fake and cruel. And it makes his blood boil, his fist connecting sideways with the wall with a sharp crack, because it used your voice, you.

And he doesn’t know what that means, he doesn’t know what’s happening, where you are or what that is.

But there’s one thing he does notice, pulling his hand away from the wall with a wince and the other rubbing at his temple. There are footprints, fresh ones. The same imprint he remembers. Yours. He could cry from relief, or some fucked up kind of it, because who knows if they’re yours, but they’re yours. There’s caution in his step as he follows them, mile after mile for what it seems like. Until they just stop.. There’s no other sign, just sticky tar that connects to nothing.

Only a wall.

Nowhere else, no door, no turn, just wall.

His hands press into it, maybe it’s a way out, maybe you did find your way out, and it’s like the “door” you came in, some other weird glitch you can just walk through. Bobby goes to press himself through it, but it doesn’t work, so he moves an inch, and other, tries it again. But nothing. It doesn’t budge.

He shoved his whole body into it, closing his eyes just for the hope, but he’s only met with damp.

—

The days, if they are even days, only make it harder to make out what's real and what's not. You haven't slept, the footsteps and breathing that wanders the halls are too loud every time you try to close your eyes. And that's the cruelest part, because the rooms haven’t just started to know you, now they understand.

The figure that waits at the end of the hall looks like Bobby, only for a second, but it's enough. The same height and same silhouette, the same crop top that peeks his stomach and jean shorts that ride low on his waist.

Some part of it is inviting.

You almost go to reach for him, but the pit in your stomach tells you not to, and instead you take off running. Slow at first, just to look over your shoulder and hope it doesn’t follow. It doesn’t. So you turn on your heel and run faster, further, until you can't see it anymore, until the image of him disappears completely.

And you don't want to forget, but it's not him. It runs over in a chant in your head. Not. Not. Not. Even if he beckons you back, pleading, calling your name like a prayer, in the sweetest voice he can, in that teasing hungry way that makes desire bubble up hungrily in your stomach. You claw it away, covering your hand over your mouth to silence your breathing, and the tears pricking your eyes.

Because it listens for that. Just so it can gather more of you.

And just as you are, paces behind wall and pipe, Bobby is unraveling.

He's exhausted and hungry, and lost, and he keeps seeing you, hearing you. Not the fake versions that pop around corners, he's already avoided and blocked those his mind however many days ago. These are memories. Glimpses of your actual life, and its torment. It’s probably delirium, his eyes already sting from the fluorescent lights and lack of sleep, and the pure adrenaline he’s running on.

But he sees it anyway.

You sitting in the break room and laughing as your legs swing over the counter, the pair of you hiding away from Clark’s strict instructions to stay out on the floor for customers. The way you roll your eyes at his jokes, and thread your hands through his hair. It’s the tiny moments, the things he misses, and he’s not sure where they’re coming from. But they’re the traces of you that make him ache.

And while his brain feels close to shutting down, the air thickening making his mind fog, the objects start appearing.

The jean jacket you stole from him when you first started dating and he let you have on the floor. Your handwriting on a clipboard with his recordings on, thrown onto a coffee table. A coffee cup with yours and his name on it because both of you used it anyway. Little impossible reminders that you're out there somewhere. Maybe alive, maybe not. He can’t bring himself to think of the latter, so he collects them, slinging the camera over his shoulder to shove what he can into his pockets or into his hands.

He shrugs the jacket on last. And it feels foreign because he hasn’t worn it in so long, because he said it was yours, but he stills in it, closing his eyes as the denim settles over his body like a blanket. He just hopes he can find you, and soon. Because whatever this place is, it’s trying to replicate too much.

There's scraps of you both in every hall, just enough to keep you searching.

And you both do, over and over. You suppose it makes sense how people can go missing, getting lured out into dangerous places with slivers of hope that they might return to home, or somewhere like it, to the things they took for granted. But how can they? When where they’re going is already catching up to them..

He starts leaving notes after a while, scraped from the sharp end of his belt buckle, and eventually from a marker he found lying about on the floor. And by some grace, it works. The notes are carved on every wall he could possibly manage to use, as a last ditch effort. It was arrows at first, his own markers of where he’d been just to keep direction. But then they were for you. Then they became notes.

KEEP GOING — B

That one is in the corner, scratched up right over an archway where a door should be, the ink of the marker still dripping down onto the carpet.

I’VE BEEN HERE — B

The next he took his time with, writing out the words carefully as he could in the very centre of an empty room. So wide and big you could see it easily.

GIVE ME A SIGN — B

The last one before it had ran out was desperate, so he used it wisely, tracing over every letter again and again until the words got bigger, probably enough to stain the walls from the inside out. But he needed it from you, not his imagination or

He stayed next to each one as long as he could, ducking back around corners as if you’d be standing right there. But you weren’t. So he kept going, tossing the dried out marker to the floor and continuing forward with one last smudged arrow on the tip of his finger. And now under that same daunting buzz he feels as if he really is losing it.

All he hears, is his name.

Bobby, Bobby, Bobby.

And it’s so clear now, it’s all you. Sometimes it’s happy and calm, other times it’s upset, sometimes it’s even mad. He doesn’t call back anymore, he just keeps his head in his hands, waiting for you to actually show, covering his ears as he tucks his head between his knees because he just can’t take it.

And only questions run in his mind.

How does he make it stop? How the fuck does he get out? And how does he get to you?

—

The scratching on the walls gets louder the farther you go, like the walls themselves are caving in, or something is pushing on it from either side, but you keep going. You have to.

You think about Clark, where he is, if he even survived what the hell happened, or if this is all a trick. Maybe you’re all doped up on some acid and this will be something to laugh at your trauma in a years time.

But it becomes real again, because the things you’ve been seeing are new, they’re fresh. They’re not created like you’ve noticed before, like a dollhouse with things rearranged. Furniture and distorted versions of places you recognise, they’re entirely their own..

The writing.. It makes your heart pulse, because it’s his. It’s Bobby’s. You almost missed it, your shoulders hunched and feet dragging along the floor, but you looked up, a striking flash of colour in a dull room. In bright blue marker pen scraped on the inside with something sharp, like he’d realised halfway through he had something more useful.

KEEP GOING — B

You step to it carefully, and your finger traces the mark, drawing over the line where his hand must have been. The letters are edged and wobbly like his hand had been shaking, and blue marker drips down the folded wallpaper where it had been pressed too hard.

You can hardly take yourself away from it, but you have to, the writing’s big it took up your attention, but you know him better than that. All those times he’d doodle in your notebooks, taking up room on the page in sly, testing ways. Your eyes follow to the small arrow underneath the writing, and it points one way.

So you follow it without question.

The maze continues but you can only guess, sliding your hands across every wall just to peer and hope you’ll find another. It’s hours before you find another one again, but you do.

I’VE BEEN—

You only begin to read it when you pause.

Because it’s not the writing that you find first, it’s it. Long legs stalk the hallways with a thump, taking up every second before it moves again, and it groans, shaking the floor around you. You catch yourself around the corner, crouching backward into a shadowed area of the wall. The steps stop, slowing just as the floorboards beneath you manage to creak.

Your heart hammers, and your teeth clench so hard you think they might break, and you don’t care if they do so long as it keeps you quiet. Because the footsteps pick up, uncoordinated and unstable, but fast, like a toddler would. You hear it stumble across the floor, chasing to pick up more sound, but you don’t give it. Your breath quickens into your palm, you just hop its quiet enough.

But something else isn’t.

A loud crash, followed by a “Shit” echoes down the hall, and your eyes blow wide. Because that’s the most familiar sound you’ve heard. It rings in your head, and you play it over. You’ve heard that before. It’s startled and unsteady.

It’s Bobby.

You close your eyes to tight you can feel the pulse in your eyeballs, wanting to reach out, to crawl from the space and yell for him. But you can’t, there’s already a scuffle of shoes and the heavy thump of leg saunters slowly back down the corridor and further away.

—

Minutes have passed since that noise. It’s silent, deadly silent, and even though you’ve heard and seen it all, that’s worse. Because what if he’s hurt, or whatever that is has caught up to him, or if he didn’t even see you.

Your hand pulls shakily away from your mouth with an absent mind, crawling forward into your hands and knees from where you’d dropped yourself onto the floor. The carpet shuffles under your legs, and you slow when you make it to the corner, exhaling shortly before rising back to your feat. Your fingers grip at the wall, tighter than you need to steady yourself.

But ten feet away isn’t what you expected. Ten feet away in that endless yellow hall, neither of you can trust what you're seeing. But you’re there, and he’s there and breathing, sweat beads his brow and tears prick at your eyes.

It’s real and the eerie silence falls away, it’s gentler and hushed.

His leg stumbles as he goes to reach for you, dropping everything he has, and you barely make it fully into his line of sight before he trusts his gut more than he can take and collides with you.

“Holy shit.. holy shit.” He holds you like you could break, but not something fragile, something that could fall if he only let you go. And he won’t. His fingers clutch at your sides, your hair, your face, pulling you close just to pull back and look at you again.

“You hurt?”

He checks for bruises, cuts, any signs of anything that wouldn’t be right, frantic eyes taking all over you. There’s a few of them he notes, some minor scrapes you caught along the way whilst ducking around corners, and some you didn’t care to remember. But they’re minimal, just like his own.

And then he’s on you. Lips, teeth, everything.. because he doesn’t know what to do. His lips capture yours tender and sharp all at once, grazing your lip just to get closer where his hand cradles the back of your head.

He only retracts when you’re both gasping for air, faces barely inches away as your foreheads are left touching. “I’m here baby..” Your hands hold his arms until they wrap around his waist, steadying yourselves against each other. You try to come up with the words but after so long of running, the back of your throat is dry and coarse.

His palms slide over your cheek, thumbs stroking at your temples and wiping away dry and damp tears. “I.. found you.” It’s all you can manage, and it’s enough to make him pull you into him again. This time it’s tighter, your face pressed right into his chest and all you can see is fabric, not the outside, not the blinking of LED’s or the patterned ceiling, just him. He even still has remnants of his cologne, the cheap one he swears by, and you breathe it in.

Bobby tucks his chin onto your head, his own body fighting not to betray itself and collapse completely.

“You did.. I’ve got you now.”

You feel as if you could, that you could will this all away now that he’s here. But this place has to break it, and it knew how to throw the biggest curveball.

“Guys come on..”

A voice calls behind you, so familiar it has to be another trick. You don’t look up, you tuck yourself further into Bobby’s chest and keep your feet clamped tight to the ground. If you ignore it, it’ll go away.

“Clark..? Is that you man..? ” Bobby’s voice follows, seeing something that you don’t. You shove him, whisper between you not to, that it’s not Clark, that you both need to leave.

He doesn’t argue with you, but he doesn’t move you either, he just lets you straighten, stepping just to the side of him as his arm sweeps out protectively in front. He takes a half-step forward, both of you glancing up to where the lights start to jitter wildly and that’s when you catch sight of him.

He’s stood half at a corner, only one side of his body. His shirt looks the same, tucked and proper, and he looks almost calm, peacefully so.

“I’m glad I found you guys, I’ve got to show you something..”

“Clark what is this place..” Your head shakes for you, a clear no, and you speak up, reaching for Bobby’s arm just to stop him from inching too close.

“Everything that ever was..” He reveals himself then. And it’s nothing out of the ordinary, that’s the terrifying part. Because after everything you’ve been put through, split up and chewed up by a place designed to drive you insane, he is at one with it. The gap behind him is narrow, blocked with stacks of mangled chairs, and you didn’t notice before, but the wall behind you is coloured.

It’s different from the other walls. It has drawings and writing, like a mural. Most of them are small and unreadable, little notes and diary entries scattered in a frenzy, but one catches your eye. The biggest one. A tall, silhouetted figure claims the space, rising above everything else, and holding an even smaller figure in its grasp. There’s other colour. Blue and yellow and red.. Is that meant to be blood?

Clark keeps moving, slow and calculated, cornering you both as you circle each other. You kick Bobby’s foot as slyly as you can. He hasn’t noticed it yet, but he does now, eyes flicking to you confused into to follow where you point.

He tries his best to make it out, it’s all some messed up graffiti work, but it makes it’s point. Whatever it is, it’s showing something sinister, and what that is? It’s in here.

Bobby grabs at your arm, stepping you both to the wall as Clark steps past, moving toward you with his hands up. The narrow hall in the far corner groans, or rather whatever is at the other end of it does, and that’s when you hear it. The same thump. The same clatter and shuffling. It comes in patters, every drag of a boot inching closer until the noise steps louder.

All three of you pause without a word, Bobby’s fingers curling tighter around yours, eyes darting between the hallway and Clark.

“What was that..?”

Clark’s eyes don’t tear away from the space, he just shushes you, placing his finger to his lip, and for some reason you listen, because that much is clear. It will hear you.

“It’s only me.. you know me.”

You and Bobby look at each other, and you feel colour drain from your face. It doesn’t add up what it means. Of course you know him, you’ve known him all of what, a year or so? But it’s like some sick riddle, that neither you are in half the mind to piece.

“Uh yeah, I think we’ve had enough of this shit..” Bobby calls out, ignoring the screech that pierces from the other side of the wall, he just holds you tighter.

“No wait.” Clark’s hand goes to reach for your wrist.

But Bobby is faster, taking you in arm and propelling you both down the corridor. You hit into walls, your hands bracing them as your feet scrape at the carpet and try to keep up, but you keep going, and you can’t look back. You already know he’s following, chasing, calling out to you both that it’s not safe, that he knows a way out, that it’s okay to stay a while..

It makes your throat go dryer than it already is. He doesn’t seem like himself, not that he ever seemed a ‘self’ at all. Clark was always fantastical, ambitious, wanting to be everywhere at once and hating the world for holding him down. If that was even the problem. But he was kind to you, to you both, taking you into that store when no other jobs were taking applications.

And then customers grew less, and business hung by a thread, and things went awry. He started sleeping in the store, he was brash in telling you not to lock up and not to come in too early, and then he wouldn’t open it at all for weeks. He became a shell. One that you tried to break, and help, but he’d refused it, and he’d been content that way.

That was until he came to you both with his idea, with his “research”. Research that ended you both up here. A place where things felt surreal, somewhere where time didn’t bother to check itself, and right now where you weren’t sure where you were going to end up.

And it adds up, because you’ve lost count how long you’ve been running, just that the grip on your arm is sore, doors have been slammed behind you and Clark is no longer there. Bobby hides you both around a corner, guiding the way, running up staircases and down sloping floors that should be.

You finally stop in a smaller space, there are less doors and openings, less invitation from the things outside to come in. He releases you only for a second to shut what looks like a closet door with a click, crossing the space in a few single strides just to get to you.

“You okay..?” His back falls against the wall opposite, resting his head where he tries to catch his breath.

Your hand places over your heart, thumping and hammering beneath your rib cage, “No.. you?” He only shakes his head, looking up at you with an expression that puzzles you. Because he looks terrified, and tired, and hopeful all at once.

And he is.

He’s hopeful because he’s found you, that he can cross the room just to hold you in his arms again like he does. He’s tired because it’s been hours, days however the hell long you’ve spent in there with no food, no water and being followed. And terrified.. because things feel too familiar.

And that’s when you realised it, the room you’d found yourselves in. Not just any one, or one you’d seen like wandering the endless corridors, this one is different, this one you know.

The apartment is warm, oddly warm, as if heat and comfort could ever reach a place like this. But it’s not the temperature that makes it that way, it’s the way it feels. Everything is in place just like you remember it, like home, your home, the apartment on the lot in the suburbs that you and Bobby lease. That no matter how many times you complain about it, you wish you were there in it now. The unwatered plant pot still sits on the windowsill, your toothbrushes still sit in a plastic cup, his pot is shoved in the kitchen drawer.

Even some of your clothes hang in the closet, your bed still messy the way you laid it out and didn’t make it in time that one morning. Some of the chair legs stick too far into the floor, and the lettering on the cereal boxes that are empty are all wrong, but it’s almost there. It’s still remembering.

Remembering your space, remembering you.

It takes a while for you to even remember that the jacket Bobby’s wearing is one of your own, or it became it. It makes you smile, even if the scratching in your stomach grows impatient. Because this place is dulling your senses, and Bobby can’t bring himself to move an inch away from you to make sure that you’re real.

You’re going to get out of this place, you have to.

For now you just have to look past the open windows and shutters. The plain, yellow walls and what creeps past them are enough to make your brain go fuzzy. Bobby doesn’t stop moving, he paces the hallway of your parallel home with a disturbed determination, shoving his hand through his messy, golden hair.

“We need to get out of here..”

The sound of footsteps pulled him from his misery. Maekar looked down the hall, lavender eyes finding your chambermaid walking towards your rooms. He stepped out in front to stop her. 

“Where the fuck is my wife?” The Prince demanded. The poor girl looked terrified. Eyes wide, she stuttered out an answer.

“She- she is in your chambers my Prince, asked me to come undress her after being out all day.” She managed to get out. Maekar’s glower grew.

“Where has she been?” He bit out. The girl paused for a moment, unsure how to answer without angering him further. 

“My lady was out in town this afternoon.” 

“What?”

“She was so excited, my Prince! Thought today perfect to visit the marketplace is all.” 

Maekar’s jaw was so tense the maid reckoned he may crack a tooth. 

“If you please, my Prince, I must attend her.” 

He raised his hand to stop her. 

“No, don’t bother, I will attend to my wife. I will not be interrupted.” 

Every servant in Summerhall knew the meaning behind those words. The woman scampered off with an awkward curtsey as the Anvil turned to deal with his woman. 

*****

Maekar slammed the chamber door open, the flames flickering in the candles near the entrance. You jumped, spinning to see him and clutching your chest dramatically.

“Oh, my love, you startled me.” 

You grinned at him, but your smile shifted into bewilderment as he stood in the archway, huffing and glaring. Slowly, you made your way to him. 

“Maekar, my darling, are you alright?” 

You reached out for him, fingertips skimming the silvery hair on his jaw before he roughly gripped your wrist. Your eyes widened. Maekar stepped close enough to you that you could feel his breath, pressing his temple against your forehead, brow furrowed. 

“Really, what happened? Tell me you're alright.” You said softly. 

He scowled.

“Do you make a mockery of me?” 

Confusion washed over your face. 

“I could not know what you mean, my love.” 

He pulled back, giving you an incredulous look. 

“Really? Running off on your own, sneaking out like a child? Every man in this castle has had to answer to me today on your whereabouts, and here you were, consorting with the fucking commoners?” The Prince spat out. 

“Maekar, darling, everything is fine, you do not need to follow me around all day.” You attempted to soothe, gently running a hand up his chest the way you knew he liked. 

“Do not give me your trivial falsery, I would not hear it. Do you really need attention so badly you must throw yourself into danger?” 

The eye roll you gave him did not help to calm his anger. His tone as he continued sent a shiver down your spine, both in fear and in lust. He bent low again, whispering against your ear:

“You are going to put your husband at ease for the agony you caused me.”

You attempted a smirk, though your voice was void of the sly resonance you aimed for. 

“What can I do for you, sweet Prince?” 

“Get on your knees.”

The sound of Maekar's raspy voice made your legs weak. Without pulling your eyes from his face, you slowly lowered herself down in front of him. He ran a hand through your hair, gently gripping the back of your head to pull you closer. Heat radiated off of him as you nuzzled your nose into his clothed cock. 

“Maekar-”

“Silence, woman. Take my cock out.” 

You didn’t need telling twice. 

Quickly, you moved your fingers to the fastenings of his trousers, the leather slipping down far enough to expose him, and wrapped your fingers firmly around the base of his cock. He used the grip on your hair to direct your lips to the angry tip. Gooey precum leaked out, and you licked the bead with the tip of your tongue. 

“No teasing me.” Maekar growled out. You took him in your mouth, tongue sliding down the underside until your nose hit the soft blond hair above his length. The Prince leaned his head back, moaning softly as he guided your lips, the sound of it mixing with the wetness. You moved your head back, sucking in your cheeks as you pulled up and down the length. The grip on your hair tightened as you cupped his balls in your hand, gently massaging them as you sucked on the tip of his cock. 

Your gentle touch was not what he was looking for.

Maekar held your head still, and began to move his hips instead, pistoning his length into your throat. He revelled in the choking moans you released as you gripped his strong thighs. After the irritation, the fear, and the anger of the day, he wasn’t going to last long. Sinking into your mouth, he held you around him, as hot come shot out from his tip. 

“Thats it, take it, girl, take what I give you.” 

You complied, so easy for him, and swallowed down the spend he released into your throat. Maekar continued to shudder, his grip loosening on your hair as he came down. Slowly, he pulled your mouth off, hot come dribbling from your lips and dripping onto the stone floor. He rubbed his thumb against the mess, scooping the excess off your chin and pressing it back into your mouth. Heavy breathing filled the chamber as the Prince worked to catch his breath. Pulling his finger from your lips, he turned his hand and extended it to you, helping you to stand before him. Your poor knees were weak from kneeling, and you fell forward into his arms to steady herself. Maekar held you snugly against him, pressing a firm kiss to your crown before turning you to press your spine against his hard chest. His long fingers found the ties to your gown, and quickly he rendered you bare for him.

“Go get on the bed. Hands and- Hands and knees, Woman.” He groaned out against your neck, kissing behind your ear before giving you a tap on the ass in the direction of the shared bed. 

You stumbled forward, casting a heated glance behind you as you crept up onto the soft sheets, arching your spine and daintily crossing your ankles as you awaited your Prince. Maekar stared for a moment, taking in the shape of his wife before him, before stalking closer. Fingers traced up the back of your thigh, his large hand splaying out on your backside as he came up behind you. 

“Do you understand, my wife, why I must do this?” Makar asked, tone patronizing. 

Your attitude was met with a sharp smack on the ass. 

The Prince's name came out in a startled moan as our whole body reacted, whimpering as you pressed your chest to the bed and arched yourself out further for him. 

Maekar smirked at the presentation of your glistening folds. His large hand came down to spank you again, his eyes focused on the ripple of your tender flesh. Again and again, he slapped at your ass, alternating left and right, until the skin reddened from his assault. You were whimpering now, a tear of wetness dribbling down your thigh. He sat beside you on the bed, rubbing his palm against the angry flesh as if to soothe the ache. 

“Hush now, my love, I’m not done with you yet.” 

Maekar heard you suck in a breath before his hand came down against your cunt, softer than before but no less firm. After each spank, he roughly rubbed his fingers against your heat, circling your clit before bringing his fingers back for another slap. The sounds you made were music to the cruel Prince’s ears. Whining, moaning, begging him to give you some form of relief from his endless tirade. Your fists gripped the silken sheets as you thrust your hips back towards his hand. 

Slowly you quieted, eyes wet, mouth open. 

Right where he wanted you. 

The prince moved his fingers back to your clit, gently circling the little nub with the tip of his finger before sliding his finger up to your hole. So, so, slowly, he pressed two of his long fingers inside, continuing until he reached the knuckles. You wiggled your hips back, trying in vain to fuck yourself back on his fingers. A firm arm around your waist stopped you from moving as he languidly thrusted his fingers back and fourth, curving the digits and causing your legs to shake. 

“That’s it, Princess, take what I give you. Ass up like a whore for me,” Maekar sped up his penetration, unrelenting even as you tried your best to wiggle out of his grip. “Stop moving. You do as I tell you,” He slid a third finger into your gooey cunt, dewy wetness squelching around him.

“You are mine.” 

Your thighs began to shake, unintelligible sounds growing louder as your soft heat fluttered around his fingers. Maekar growled as you came, his name falling from your lips. He continued to thrust as the orgasam ripped through you. He pressed his lips to your back, your hips, your reddened bottom, anywhere he could reach as you came down from your high. Your chest pressed down into the sheets as he gradually pulled his fingers free, palm pressing to your quivering pussy.

“Look at you, see how nice I am when you do what I say?” The Prince asked smugly, standing up without pulling his hand from your heat. He was hard again. Painfully hard. You let out a choked sob as he rubbed the spongy head of his cock through your quivering folds. 

“Oh, did you think I was done with you?”

He slid himself into the hilt, head falling back at the slick warmth firmly gripping him. You arched your back, letting out a noise he’d never heard you make before. It made him grin; a rare sight to behold. The pace he set was fervent, sliding a large hand from your hip up your back, finding a place in the back of your hair. He griped it harshly, in the way he knew you secretly loved, and was rewarded with a shrieking of his name. 

“You were made for this, to lay beneath me, to take my cock.” Maekar groaned out as he continued to thrust. He felt you press yourself back into him weakly, his heavy balls slapping your pussy. 

“You want this, don't you? Just want to be used. That's why you act out, to be punished. You love it. Say it. Say that you want my cock.”

The prince halted his movements, and watched with an arrogant sneer as you gripped the silken sheets, trying desperately to chase your high by rubbing yourself back on his cock. He held your hips fast to stop you. 

“Oh gods, I love your cock, Maekar.”

The Prince grinned. The sweet sigh you let out when he continued his thrusting was worth the wait. He moved his other hand down underneath you, gripping one of your breasts firmly, before sliding down past your stomach, finding a place against your clit. You grew louder as his long fingers circled the bud, wetness dripping down your soft thighs. He kissed your shoulder as you came, the second time that night, shaking in his arms. Soon he followed, slamming himself deep inside you, hot come filling your warmth. 

“That's it, take it, Princess.” Maekar moaned against your skin, but it had lost its sharpness from before. He stayed there a moment longer before slowly lifting off of you. 

Maekar lay back beside you, shoulders pressed together. He sucked his fingers into his mouth and groaned out, an animalistic noise coming from deep inside him. You let out an amused huff, and he wrapped his free arm around your waist, pulling you close as you lay your head against his chest. The Prince pressed kisses to your hair as you breathed together.

“My dearest lady wife, you are so, so, good for me.” He whispered out. You hummed, a hand sliding up to caress his white beard and scarred cheek. Maekar turned his head to kiss your palm. 

You lay together for a while, sun setting and casting a golden glow across the room. Maekar breathed you in, smelling the flowery oils you used in your hair. He closed his eyes and smiled, content. If only for a moment. 

 You tapped his chest. 

“Maekar, move up for me.”

He gave you a confused look. “What?” 

Maekar’s cock twitched at you tell-tale grin. 

“I’m not done with you yet.” 

That certainly got your Prince moving. He reluctantly pulled himself away from you as he moved to lean back against the plush pillows. You crawled on shaky knees toward him, and he helped guide you straddle his lap. The damp leather peeled away from his chest as you unbuckled his doublet, ridding him of his coverings and bearing his chest. The Prince breathed heavily as you undressed him, cock firming again against his stomach. 

You took his face in your hands. 

“Maekar, please, you will forgive me, my love, won't you?” 

He held your gaze for a moment longer before he gave you a stern nod, digging his fingers into your hips. You kissed his face, over and over, as he wrapped his arms tightly around your waist. He lifted you, grabbing his cock with one hand and sliding the head back in fourth against your warmth. 

You shuddered, gripping his shoulders as he pressed the spongy head into your cunt. He let you slide down on his length, pausing to breathe as you adjusted to the size and the new angle. The two of you shuddered together as you seated herself to the hilt. He kissed you tenderly then, pressing his tongue into your warm mouth as you held his face.

“I love you, my Prince.”

Maekar gripped your waist as you rolled your hips, thrusting your chest forward as he wrapped his lips around your tight nipple. He sucked hard, laving his tongue against your flesh as you writhed in his lap. The Prince found his second wind, planting his feet on the bed and fucking up into you as your breasts bounced against his face. 

“Oh gods, my dearest Prince, my love.” You whined out, her high pitched moaning encouraging Maekar to speed his thrusting. The wet slapping sound of your joining bodies rang out through the chamber. He wrapped his arm firmly around you, the other hand alternating between slapping and grabbing your ass. Lips trailed down your neck, across your breasts, your collarbones, anywhere he could reach. You gripped his strong shoulders, moving your hips down against his pelvis as he reached a place deep inside you, so deep you thought you might feel it in your throat. 

You licked his chest, biting and kissing his flesh. It caused him to hold you ever more firmly, pressing you against him as he fucked your warm cunt hard enough that you were rendered boneless. He felt you shake in his arms, writhing as you came on his thick length. His climax quickly followed. He kept you down on him as he filled you again, ropes of spend shooting into your cunt. Hot, fat tears ran down your cheeks, and he held you tightly as you whispered and gripped his biceps.

“I love you, I love you. You’re so good to me darling, my dearest wife. I love you.” Maekar mumbled out, lips against her forehead. A very rare moment of vulnerability, declarations of his love for you so scarcely coming verbally.  He slid a hand up your back to pet your hair, threading his long fingers through. 

“You wear me out, husband.” You whispered out. He let out a chuckle and held you tighter. You turned your head to press kisses against the scarred side of his face, flicking your tongue out against the salt of his skin.

“Maekar, you will not keep me locked up in this castle, will you?” You asked, eyes wide. The Prince sighed.

“Your safety is too important to me to treat so frivolously, what would I do if you were gone?” 

His tone was severe, but you could sense the underlying fear underneath. He really had been worried for you, ready to tear down the holdfast brick by brick if it meant he could find you. Gently, you stroked his cheek.

“Maybe you could accompany me next time? After all, who better to protect your lady wife than the Anvil?” 

Maekar rolled his eyes at your teasing and turned his head, pressing a searing kiss to your lips. You grabbed his face, kissing him all over until a small grin spread across his lips. He hummed in response.

"tickles," you breathe against his flushed cheek, nuzzling against the jut of his jaw. maekar's blanketing you from shoulders to knees, and it feels so good, like the warmest hearth you could ask for. the pleasure is truly a bonus.

he huffs, amused, leaning into your touch as he grumbles. "yeah? doesn't hurt, does it, my heart? feels good?" always asking, always making sure he's not too forceful, too rough, too... animal with you.

your sweet dragon.

you shake your head, smiling at him through small, sweet sighs. "never, love," you assure him, and the way his scaly wings twitch and then move to cocoon you more under him tells you all you need to know. he's pleased. so pleased to know that even now, even like this, more beast than man—looking every inch a predator looming over you and rutting so deep you can feel him in your womb—he's protecting you. he's making you feel warm and good and loved.

his eyes make you melt, slitted and wide with heat and affection as they trail down towards where you're connected, blinking slowly, as if in a trance, wordlessly showing you what you already know. that he loves you. that he loves having you like this and knowing he's the only one who can and will ever be in this position.

a groan rumbles from deep within his chest, so akin to a marvelous beast of ancient times, making you shiver and clench around his cock, urging him to parrot the sound, this time lower; more animal. "think this time it'll take?" his hand touches your stomach reverently, talon-tipped fingers scraping down feather light across the skin, just enough to prickle. maekar's eyes blow wider the more he watches, feeling the way his cock moves beneath his palm. "think you'll carry my clutch soon, wife? keep them warm right here until you're full and round."

the words make you whine, hands moving to grasp at his shoulders, thumbs brushing along the rough scales that litter the broad expanse of skin, eliciting a soft sound from your husband. "yes, my sweet dragon," you moan, eager and tender. the way his wings flare wider, almost obscuring your vision of anything but him, the light in the room suddenly dimmed, making more heat curl low in your belly, close enough to burst. "i want a brood of your hatchlings."

a growl, long and so, so deep it seeps into the very marrow of your bones slips past maekar's lips. you can feel his talons scrape at your skin just enough to make you gasp, before he catches himself and eases his grip back to gently cradling your stomach. "you'll have them," he groans, hips snapping against the fat of your ass, rutting faster, deeper. his wings have not stilled once, curling and twitching incessantly as the pleasure mounts, his tail unfurling from your ankle to slither upwards, brushing against your thighs, your hips; greedy and frantic for more contact. the tip of it seeks the swollen clit at the top of your wet pussy, flicking against the nub in time with his thrusts. "i'll fuck you so full of my seed, they'll hatch by winter."

the promise, paired with the stimulation to your clit makes you whine, high and pitiful, clutching at his scaly shoulders, nails scraping over the rough surface, pulling a punched out moan from maekar's chest. "yes, yes, please, husband, please—"

"shh, shh, settle," he croons, leaning down to nose along your neck, forked tongue dipping to taste. "you'll have them, my heart," the words are pressed into your skin, rumbling deep and soothing as he nuzzles and licks at the sweat along your throat. "we'll have them," he corrects. "pretty, soft hatchlings, just like you, wife."

“you trust me, right?” is the first thing cousin!daeron asks before kissing your inner thighs.

you’re not entirely sure you can trust cousin!daeron, he’s been pushing you to do things you know a princess shouldn’t do. but with his head between your legs and your skirts pushed up over your thighs there isn’t much else you can do. besides every time you try to protest against this, or push him away he speaks over you and gently pushes you back down.

a princess should keep her virtue, that’s what the septons have always told you, the faith, your family— cousin!daeron promises you can keep your virtue in tact as he pushes you down onto the pillows behind you.

cousin!daeron chuckles as he looks up at you, noticing how scared you look. “you’re trembling,” he notes, before parting your thighs apart. “i’m not going to hurt you.”

cousin!daeron kisses your thighs first, gentle as he pecks at them before his tongue darts out his mouth and he licks. you hands tremble by your sides and you clench them together as his lips trail up nearing your bare—

you yelp when cousin!daeron nips at your subtle skin. your hand goes to push him off but his hand catches it, slipping his fingers between yours as he sucks on the mark.

cousin!daeron chuckles once again at the way you thighs clench around his face, his breath fanning over your bare cunt. you tense at the feel of it, letting you let out a shaky breath when his lips hover over you, feeling his breath once again when he tells you to, “relax.”

you try your hardest to lie still on the blankets, nails digging into the palm of your hands to keep you from wriggling. you even take a breath to calm your erratic nerves, sucking in a deep breath and trying to visualise your muscles untightening as cousin!daeron kisses the cress between your thigh and your cunt.

your fingers tighten around his own when cousin!daeron kisses over your folds, his lips there for a brief second before he ventures further down, kissing gently before he reaches to your most wet area.

cousin!daeron lets out a low chuckle before you feel his tongue slip out, licking up the liquid that has spilled from your hole.

you can’t help but wriggle when cousin!daeron’s tongue shoves itself deep inside of you, trying to push yourself away. only he doesn’t let you, hooking his arms around your thighs and holding your thighs tight so your cunt is flush against his face.

cousin!daeron tells you to “keep quiet” while he licks unapologetically at your clit, making the most obscene noises that fill the room. you can’t tell him how this feels strange, can’t tell him to stop because you’re too busy biting back moans from the back of your throat.

cousin!daeron feels proud when you scream his name between clenched teeth, how he can tell you’re desperate to tell him something but in the heat of your climax all you can manage to get out is his name. he feels a rush of pride when he kisses all the way from your soaked mound till your begging for respite, pushing him off with weak hands.

cousin!daeron adores being the one to pull you into his chest after you’ve come down, to quieten your sobs as he holds you to him. he’s good at telling you it’s alright, telling you that it’s okay to enjoy this. he enjoys corrupting you, destroying those ideas the septas have built in your brain, watching the guilt wreak havoc on your body when ever he even looks your way.

“But you promised you’d come dancing with me!” your tone was almost angry in its desperation as your little celebration group was saying goodbye to each other. You were looking at your two best friends on the team, even though you could tell they'd already had too much to drink. 

You must have been such a pathetic sight, dressed to the nines for the partying: strappy high heels, cute going-out top that you paired with the miniskirt in the same style, tiny little bag that was hanging on your wrist, and the make-up, all light and glittery, perfect for the clubbing scene. Everyone was apologising, weak excuses of being too tired, too drunk, or having to meet up with someone else, despite at least four of them giving you a thumbs-up in the group chat. And it wasn’t even that late.

“I’ll come dancing with you,” you heard a deep chuckle behind you, and most of your teammates immediately fell into a contagious giggle, yelling and howling.

“Don’t tease me like that, Mike,” you pouted, turning around to give him the biggest puppy eyes, looking up at him through your eyelashes. 

Oh, you wished badly for Coach Mike to come dancing with you. You were watching him the whole evening, that gold chain of his flashing under his polo, the nipples, as always, peeking through his shirt. You imagined biting his fat pecs, wondering how big his cock truly was. Your face was flushing already. 

“I’m not teasing,” he laughed again, chewing that gum like a certified slut, driving you crazy. “I mean it, I’ll take you dancing.”

“Coach, do you even know how to dance?” someone yelled from behind you two as he gentlemanly offered you his hand to hold onto. 

“I’m not sure I do,” he replied, but to you, laughing. His face was red, as it always was when he drank even a drop of alcohol. He tried winking at you, moving his whole face instead of just the eyelid; you laughed at how adorable he was.

“You will have to dance regardless,” you bit your lip, looking back at him, guiding him through a crowded dance floor, your hand completely lost in his, his long, thick fingers engulfing your hand and your wrist, holding firmly but gently at the same time. 

Mike laughed, placing his other hand on your waist when you finally stopped. You were already sweaty and nervous as well. Coach Mike wasn’t exactly checking you out, he never did such a thing, but he also couldn’t take his eyes off you. You didn’t know him that well, as you never spoke much and he didn’t have that many tips and advice to give you; in fact, most of your sessions he would mark as great and tell you to keep up the good work.

So, to say you were surprised by his sudden volunteering to be your dance partner would be more than true, although you were not sure if you could even read the situation correctly; unknown to literally everyone, you took half a tablet of Xanax that was technically prescribed to you, although ages ago, and that you, also technically, were not supposed to mix with alcohol. 

You knew Mike would report you if he knew, so you hoped that he would interpret your half-lidded eyes as a result of alcohol, and attraction to him. Maybe if you stroked his ego, or something else, he wouldn’t notice.

“Fuck,” you laughed, placing your hands on his chest, stumbling forward when someone accidentally pushed you from behind, “I think I forgot how to dance.”

Mike laughed with you, his grip on your waist growing stronger, his hands subtly sliding down to your hips, just as your hands went up to his neck, your fingers sliding against his tanned skin, collecting drops of sweat, tangling into his hair before finally interlacing behind his neck. 

You were pressed together as you swayed your body, your hair flying around as you let go, trusting Mike completely to hold you. He wasn’t doing that much, mostly letting you do your thing and following your lead, his hands steadying you while still trying to keep a polite distance between you two, at least regarding some parts of your bodies, the ones you really wanted to press together.

You turned around, stumbling back against him by complete accident; you were tipsy after all, tipsy and horny. Not that you hoped for much, or anything at all, except maybe some memories you would use later when alone in the shower. 

Finally, you slowed down a little, letting Mike sway you to the rhythm, leaning against him a little, just a little, you said to yourself, just for a short while. Surely, he wouldn’t mind?

Mike pressed you harder against yourself, sending small bursts of intense butterflies through your stomach; you immediately felt so weak.

Then you felt it, both at the same time: his head falling to your neck as he dragged his nose and then his lips over your hot skin, and his hard cock, grinding slowly against your ass. Mike’s breath was stuttering just as yours was hitching, his fingers impatiently touching the little skin peeking between your top and skirt. 

The heat pooled in your pussy, and you could already tell you were wet, your slick soaking your panties. You were dizzy, trying to think - was he just dancing, enjoying himself, or did he want to fuck you? Well, you certainly wanted to fuck him, even before knowing how big he was. Now you wondered how fat he was, as you couldn’t tell it through the fabric.

“I need some air,” you finally announced, grabbing him by his hand and dragging him with you. He followed, closer than before, constantly trying to keep his other hand around your waist or on your hips.

You stopped, faced with the final decision: to continue straight ahead towards the exit, a light breeze already hitting your face, or head down towards the restrooms. You looked up to Mike, almost as if asking, trying to guess if he’d get mad if you led him down the stairs. His hand slipped from your hip to your ass, squeezing lightly, all the answer you needed.

His mouth crashed onto yours the moment he locked the restroom stall door behind you, pinning you against the wall. You let Mike overwhelm all your senses, tangling your hands in his hair again, pulling him closer. Your teeth clashed, but neither of you cared, Mike impatiently bunching up your skirt, two of his fingers sliding to touch your folds through the soaked fabric of your panties.

“Fuck,” he moaned into your mouth as you were palming his cock. “Fuck,” he moaned again. You expected him to turn you around and bend you over slightly, but Mike grabbed your thighs, picking you up in an instant. Pinning you against the wall, you wrapped your legs around him, using one arm to hold yourself steady, clinging to his neck. 

“How strong are you?” Your moan was hot on his face, drawing a proud chuckle out of him.

With your other hand, you freed his cock, pulling at his belt and pants a little clumsily, but ultimately successfully. Mike lowered you a little, grinding his already leaking cock against your panties, but you couldn’t wait, moving them to the side.

Mike buried himself into your pussy with a long grunt, pressing his forehead against yours.

His cock was indeed fat, fat and long and veiny, and it was currently twitching inside you as you tried to accommodate him. Somewhere, your mind registered the hushed giggles of a woman’s bathroom, but you couldn’t care less, especially when Mike started fucking into you.

Every thrust was making you see the stars, heat pulsing through your whole body. It took everything in you not to scream and moan loudly, and you were usually quiet in bed. Your nails were buried into his shoulders, but if Mike minded, he didn’t say anything. 

“Go harder,” you moaned directly into his mouth, and something in his eyes sparkled.

He snapped his hips, hard enough that your back and even the back of your head hit against the stall wall harder, making you moan out, gripping harder at him. Encouraged, he continued, and soon you couldn’t hear anything but your body repeatedly hitting the wall and Mike’s ever louder grunts. It felt so good not to be in control, to let go completely, to allow someone else to lead and take care of you and your pleasure. And your pleasure came, surprising you, making you whimper out in a high-pitched tone you didn’t quite recognise.

Feeling your pussywalls trying to milk him dry, and seeing how much you enjoyed his cock, Mike finally let go, after barely succeeding in not spilling in you the moment you asked him to fuck you properly. He stayed buried in you until the last drop and then carefully put you down. You stumbled out of the stall, not even bothering to clean up, your panties soaking most of his spend, the rest of it drying on the insides of your thighs. 

“Are you okay?” two girls asked you with a concern in their voices, looking at you breathing heavily, make-up completely smudged, and barely able to stand by yourself. You nodded, watching them glance between you and Mike, who had already wrapped his arm around you.

“Yeah,” you smiled faintly at them, trying to reassure them. “This is the best night of my life.”

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SECTION 1 — ENTITY SUMMARY

Designation: Entity 0

Colloquial Name(s): "Better Bobby," "The First," "It" (field teams), ██████████████ (designation rescinded, see Incident Report 0-14) Primary Domain: Level 0 (unconfirmed territorial claim over full sublevel network) Secondary Sightings: Levels 1, 2, 3, 4, 6, 14, ████, ██████, and the Poolrooms (unverified) Threat Classification: APEX-UNDEFINED Containment Status: UNCONTAINED — ALL CONTAINMENT ATTEMPTS SUSPENDED INDEFINITELY Behavioural Profile: UNPREDICTABLE / ADAPTIVE / SAPIENT (CONFIRMED) Entity Kill Count (Est.): Unknown. See Section 5. Human Kill Count (Conf.): █████ Human Kill Count (Est.): ███████ [DISPUTED — SEE ADDENDUM C]

NOTE FROM DR. ██████, ENTITY RESEARCH LEAD:

It should be on record that the designation 'Entity 0' was not chosen for taxonomic reasons. It was assigned because this entity predates our cataloguing system. We did not discover it. It was already here in what we class as the Backrooms. It may have always been here . The number is not a ranking. It's an admission that we do not know where to place it.

SECTION 2 — PHYSICAL DESCRIPTION

2.1 — Primary Manifestation

Entity 0 presents as a young Caucasian male, early-to-mid twenties, consistent with the physical appearance of one Robert "Bobby" Franklin (see Personnel File MEG-P-██████, Status: ACTIVE/DISPLACED). The resemblance is exact in approximately 94% of documented sightings. Remaining sightings note minor deviations: incorrect eye colour under different lighting, subtle asymmetries in facial structure that do not correspond to Franklin's known features, and—in three separate reports—a "wrongness in the joints" that observers struggled to articulate.

Franklin himself has been interviewed extensively regarding Entity 0's use of his likeness. His testimony is included in Addendum A (SEALED). He has requested, on multiple occasions, that M.E.G. ██████████████████████████████████. This request has been denied.

2.2 — Secondary Characteristics

Entity 0 bleeds a black, viscous fluid when injured. Lab analysis of recovered samples has returned ████████████████. A second analysis returned entirely different results. A third analysis caused the spectrometer to ██████████████████████████████████. Testing has been suspended.

Entity 0's body temperature registers approximately 4.2°C below ambient room temperature at all times, regardless of environmental conditions. This remains consistent even in the Poolrooms (if sightings there are verified) and the thermally unstable zones of Level 5.

When Entity 0 believes it is unobserved, field teams have reported the following:

a) Complete cessation of respiration for periods exceeding 45 minutes.

b) Head rotation beyond normal cervical range (estimated 190° in Sighting 0-22).

c) Standing perfectly motionless in a posture that does not account for gravity. One researcher described it as "standing the way a photograph of a person stands. Not wrong. Just not alive."

d) Brief episodes of what appears to be the entity's eyes changing colour—from the documented blue to solid black. Duration: 1-5 seconds. No agent has been close enough to confirm ████████████████.

e) ██████████████████████████████████ ██████████████████████████████████ for approximately nine hours. When Agent ██████ attempted to approach, ██████████████████████████████████. Agent ██████ has requested a transfer. Request granted.

2.3 — True Form

Unknown.

We do not know what Entity 0 looks like. We know what Bobby Franklin looks like. Entity 0 has never been observed without this disguise. Whether the Franklin appearance constitutes a "disguise" or has become the entity's actual physical structure is a matter of ongoing—and increasingly heated—debate within the department.

Dr. ██████ has proposed that Entity 0 may not have a "true form." That it may be, at a fundamental level, a thing that IS other things. This hypothesis is ████████████████.

SECTION 3 — BEHAVIOURAL ANALYSIS

3.1 — Unpredictability Index

Entity 0 has been assigned a Behavioural Unpredictability Index (BUI) of 9.7 out of 10. For context, most Backrooms entities operate between 2 and 6 on this scale. The Skin-Stealers register at 5.1. The Hounds at 3.8. A completely random number generator would score 10.0.

Entity 0 scores a 9.7 because it is not random. It is making decisions. We simply cannot determine the framework.

Documented behavioural range includes:

Allowing a wanderer to pass through Level 0 entirely unmolested, even appearing to clear a path by relocating other entities beforehand (Sighting 0-09).

Killing a wanderer. Method: ██████████████████████████████████. No apparent provocation. (Incident 0-03).

Sitting cross-legged in a hallway for an estimated 72 hours, staring at a wall. (Sighting 0-15). Purpose: unknown.

Engaging a Class 5 entity in what can only be described as combat. Entity 0 won. ██████████████████████████████████. The Class 5 entity has not been sighted since.

Humming. (Multiple sightings.) The melody does not correspond to any known song. ████████████████ has suggested it may be original composition. This is ██████.

Laughing at nothing. (Sighting 0-19.) Duration: four minutes. Laughter matched audio profile of Robert Franklin exactly.

██████████████████████████████████ ██████████████████████████████████ ████████████████. All seven members of Exploration Team Kilo were recovered alive. None will discuss what happened.

3.2 — Evasion Capabilities

Entity 0 does not want to be found. When it is found, it is because it has chosen to be.

M.E.G. has deployed tracking teams on fourteen separate occasions. Results were as follows:

Operation: LAMPLIGHTER Duration: 6 days Result: Entity evaded all contact. Team reported hallways "rearranging" around them.

Operation: NIGHTJAR Duration: 11 days Result: Entity sighted once. Made direct eye contact with lead tracker from end of hallway (est. 200m). Smiled. Vanished.

Operation: FOXGLOVE Duration: 2 hours Result: Entity approached team voluntarily. ██████████████████████████████████. Operation terminated.

Operation: SILKWORM Duration: 9 days Result: No contact. Post-operation analysis revealed entity had been following the tracking team for the final four days.

Operation: TIDEPOOL Duration: ██ days Result: ██████████████████████████████████ ██████████████████████████████████ ████████████████ ██████ ██████████████████████████████████ ████████████████. All further tracking operations suspended by order of ██████.

3.3 — Intelligence

Entity 0 is sapient. This is no longer debated.

It understands English. It understands Mandarin, Spanish, Arabic, and—following an incident with Exploration Team Foxtrot—fluent conversational Japanese, despite never having been observed in the presence of a Japanese-speaking wanderer. A comprehensive linguistic audit conducted in 198█ was abandoned after Entity 0 responded to a deliberately obscure dialectal prompt in ██████████████████████████████████. The full list of confirmed languages is maintained in Addendum B. It is not short.

It also understands tactical positioning. It understands, based on Operations NIGHTJAR and SILKWORM, the concept of irony.

What must be emphasised—and what continues to unsettle the department—is how dramatically Entity 0's cognitive profile diverges from every other catalogued entity. Most Backrooms entities operate on recognisable behavioural loops. The Smilers hunt. The Skin-Stealers mimic. The ██████ feed. Even the more complex entities can be understood as sophisticated biological (or pseudo-biological) systems responding to stimuli: hunger, territorial instinct, predatory drive. They do what they do because something in their construction compels them to do it.

Entity 0 does not appear to be compelled to do anything.

It does not hunt for sustenance. It does not hunt for pleasure. It does not, as far as we can determine, hunt at all. Its kills appear to be decisions, made for reasons that change depending on context and that we have failed to model despite years of behavioural data. Other entities are, for lack of a better term, animals. Complex animals. Dangerous animals. But animals still.

Entity 0 operates with what can only be described as intentionality. It makes choices. It weighs outcomes. It has, on at least two documented occasions, changed its mind mid-action, which implies an internal deliberative process that no other entity has demonstrated.

This is what makes it dangerous. Not the strength—though the strength is considerable. Not the evasion capabilities—though those are unmatched. The danger is that Entity 0's internal workings appear to be orders of magnitude more complex than anything else in the Backrooms, and we do not understand them. A Wretch is dangerous the way a bear is dangerous: powerful, aggressive, but ultimately predictable. Entity 0 is dangerous the way a person is dangerous. It thinks. It plans, adapts, and learns. And it does all of this inside a body that can tear a Class 5 entity apart in ninety seconds.

The obvious question—and the one this department has been circling for the better part of two years without satisfactory resolution—is why. Why is Entity 0 so far beyond its peers? Two hypotheses currently hold majority support:

Hypothesis A (Dr. ██████): Entity 0's cognitive superiority is a function of age. It was here first. It has had longer to develop, to complexify, to evolve whatever passes for intelligence in Backrooms entities. Under this model, Entity 0 is not fundamentally different from other entities, it is simply older. The designation "Entity 0" is, in this reading, more literal than intended. It is t he first. Everything else came after. Everything else is younger, simpler, less finished.

Hypothesis B (Dr. ████████): Entity 0 is not smarter because it is older. It is smarter because it wanted to be. Something in its composition—its origin, its structure, whatever animates it—possesses a drive toward learning that other entities lack. It doesn't just react to its environment. It studies it. It chose to wear a human face. It chose to learn human language. Not one. Dozens. It chose to understand tactical positioning and irony and the specific way Robert Franklin leans against walls. Other entities absorb. Entity 0 pursues. If this hypothesis is correct, the follow-up question becomes deeply uncomfortable: what is it learning toward? What is the curriculum building to? What does an entity that has spent ██████████████ years teaching itself to be more look like when it decides it has learned enough?

Neither hypothesis has been confirmed. Both are ███████████████.

Researcher's note: I have been asked, off the record, which hypothesis I find more frightening. The answer is (B). It's always (B).

SECTION 4 — TERRITORIAL BEHAVIOUR & DOMAIN

Level 0 (otherwise known as "The Threshold") is, by consensus, Entity 0's domain.

This is not an official M.E.G. designation but a practical observation. Entity 0 moves through Level 0 with a freedom and familiarity that no other entity displays. It does not navigate the space. It inhabits it. Hallways that shift and reconfigure for wanderers appear to remain static in Entity 0's presence, or, more disturbingly, reconfigure according to its preference.

There is a growing body of evidence—currently classified under Review Protocol ██████—suggesting that Level 0 may not simply be Entity 0's territory. It may be its ████████████. This hypothesis was first proposed by Dr. ██████ in 198█ and was initially dismissed. Following Incident 0-11, in which Entity 0 appeared to ██████████████████████████████████ ████████████████ an entire corridor, the hypothesis has been upgraded to "under active consideration."

Entity 0 has been sighted on other levels, but these incursions appear purposeful and temporary. It always returns to Level 0. One researcher described this pattern as "a predator checking its territory lines," though others have noted the behaviour more closely resembles ████████████████.

SECTION 5 — INTER-ENTITY BEHAVIOUR

Entity 0 kills other entities.

This requires emphasis because it is, within the context of Backrooms ecology, abnormal. Entities compete for territory aggressively. Entities avoid each other. Entities engage in dominance displays. Sometimes they have been observed working together to hunt and kill wanderers. Entities do not, as a rule, destroy each other with the kind of systematic, almost casual efficiency that Entity 0 demonstrates.

Confirmed Entity 0 kills:

1x Class 5 Entity (undesignated). Method: ██████████████████████████. Duration of engagement: approx. 90 seconds.

5x Hounds. Simultaneous. Entity 0 did not appear injured afterward.

17x Skin-Stealer. Entity 0 appeared to take particular ██████ with this kill. Duration: ██████. Research team observing from concealment requested psychological support afterward.

██████x ████████████████. Circumstances: ██████████████████████████████████ ██████████████████████████████████. See Section 6.

1x entity of unknown classification. Entity 0 was observed speaking to it before killing it. Words were inaudible. Lip-reading analysis suggested ██████████████████████████████████. Lip-reading analyst has since resigned.

Few entities engage in aggression toward Entity 0. The implication of such is clear: within the Backrooms ecosystem, Entity 0 is an apex predator. Other entities tend to avoid it. Some—including the Hounds, which fear nothing else in our catalogue—have been documented actively fleeing its approach.

There are, however, notable exceptions.

The Howlers appear to be, at minimum, a genuine physical threat. They have engaged Entity 0 on at least three documented occasions. The encounters were violent and protracted in a way that Entity 0's other kills are not. During Incident 0-09, Entity 0 was observed sustaining visible damage. The first and only confirmed instance of an entity injuring it in combat. The black fluid was extensive. Entity 0 killed two Howlers, but it took ██ minutes, and afterward it remained stationary in the corridor for nearly two hours. Whether this constituted recovery, pain, or something else, we cannot say. But it did not move, and field team noted it was not humming.

More concerning is the entity's documented behaviour regarding ████████████████████████████, tentatively catalogued as Entity ██████, sighted exclusively on Levels ██████ and ██████. We have very little data on this entity—three sightings total, all partial, all from significant distance—but what we do have is this: during Sighting 0-46, Entity 0 was transiting a hallway on Level ██████ when it stopped. Abruptly. The tracking team reported that it stood perfectly still for approximately ninety seconds, head tilted, and then turned around and walked the other way.

Entity 0 has never, in our observational history, retreated from anything.

What Entity 0 is protecting, or hunting, or maintaining through this behaviour remains unknown.

SECTION 6 — THE COMPANION

⚠ CLASSIFICATION: LEVEL 4 EYES ONLY — SUBSECTION RESTRICTED TO SENIOR RESEARCH PERSONNEL ⚠

6.1 — Initial Sighting

During Operation SILKWORM, tracking team reported an anomalous observation that did not pertain to the primary mission objective. Entity 0 was sighted in a hallway junction on Level 0, sublevel ██████. It was not alone.

A human female was observed walking alongside Entity 0.

Estimated age: ███. Physical description: ██████████████████████████████████. She was wearing ████████████████ and appeared to be in good physical health. She was not restrained, and was not visibly distressed. She was, by all observable measures, walking with Entity 0 voluntarily.

Entity 0 was walking between the female and the nearest dark hallway.

The tracking team leader noted this detail three times in her field report, underlining it twice. I am including it here because the behavioural implication is significant: Entity 0 was positioning itself as a barrier between the female and potential threats. This is protective behaviour. This is not something Entity 0 has ever displayed toward any other human in our records.

6.2 — Subsequent Sightings

Ref: S-31 Level: 0 Observation: Entity 0 and Companion seated against wall. Entity 0 appeared to be keeping watch while Companion slept. Entity 0 was humming.

Ref: S-34 Level: 2 Observation: Companion observed navigating. Entity 0 following. Unusual. Entity 0 does not typically follow. It leads or it ██████.

Ref: S-37 Level: 0 Observation: Entity 0 observed retrieving ██████ and presenting them to Companion. Companion laughed. Entity 0 displayed what appeared to be satisfaction.

Ref: S-41 Level: 3 Observation: Two Hounds approached Companion's position. Entity 0 intercepted. █████████████████████████████. Companion did not appear surprised by the violence. She waited. When Entity 0 returned, she handed it ██████ and they continued walking.

Ref: S-44 Level: ██████ Observation: ████████████████████████████████ █████████████████████████ ████████████████. Observation team was withdrawn immediately. Dr. ██████████ has classified this sighting at Level 5. I have not been told why.

6.3 — Identity of the Companion

The Companion has been tentatively identified as █████████████████████████, a civilian reported missing on ██████████. Missing persons report was filed by Robert Franklin. Notably, █████████████████████████ was in a relationship with Robert Franklin at the time of disappearance.

The implications of this connection—that Entity 0 selected a companion who was romantically involved with the individual whose appearance it wears—are not lost on this department. Theories range from predatory luring strategy (see Dr. ██████'s analysis, Addendum D) to ██████████████████████████████████ to something far more ████████████████ that several senior researchers have declined to put in writing.

6.3.1 — Anomaly: Erasure of Civilian Records

During routine cross-referencing with surface-level contacts, research staff discovered that the Companion's missing persons file had been closed. Not resolved. Closed. Reason listed: ████████████████. The filing officer has no memory of processing the closure.

Subsequent investigation revealed a broader pattern. The Companion's lease has been reassigned. Her workplace has no record of employment. Her university transcript exists but is flagged as a clerical duplicate with no corresponding student ID. Photographs in which she appears have not been removed: she is simply no longer in them. The physical prints are unaltered. The space where she stood is just empty. As though no one was there to begin with.

This is not normal. Wanderers who enter the Backrooms leave gaps. Families search. Records persist. Missing persons cases go cold but they do not evaporate. In ██████ years of documented Backrooms disappearances, we have never seen evidence of a wanderer being actively erased from the surface world.

Something is removing her. Not killing her. She is alive and accounted for in the Backrooms. Removing the idea of her. The evidence that she existed at all.

The obvious question is whether Entity 0 is capable of exerting influence beyond the Backrooms. The less obvious and considerably more unsettling question is why it would want to. If Entity 0 is erasing the Companion's surface existence, the implication is not destruction. It is permanence. You do not erase someone's way back unless you intend for them to stay.

This has been flagged as a Priority 1 concern. Dr. ██████ has requested that Robert Franklin be monitored for signs of ████████████████. Request granted.

6.4 — Behavioural Implications

Entity 0, in the presence of the Companion, behaves differently than in any other documented context. Specifically:

a) Aggression toward other entities increases by an estimated 300%. Entity 0's territory, already dangerous, becomes functionally impassable when the Companion is present.

b) Unpredictability decreases. Entity 0''s movements become more structured, more purposeful, more oriented around the Companion's location. For the first time in our observational history, Entity 0 is behaving in a way that can be partially predicted.

c) The entity has been observed performing behaviours with no survival utility: adjusting the Companion's blanket, standing in specific positions to block fluorescent light while she sleeps, █████████████████████████████████. These behaviours have no precedent in our entity catalogue.

d) Entity 0 has not killed a human since the Companion was first sighted. Correlation is not causation. But the correlation is ██████.

SECTION 7 — RESEARCH & CONTAINMENT PROPOSALS

7.1 — Proposal: Use the Companion to Study Entity 0

STATUS: UNDER REVIEW

The Companion represents an unprecedented opportunity. Entity 0, which has evaded every tracking operation, every surveillance deployment, and every research team we have sent into Level 0, has voluntarily anchored itself to a single human being. Its movements are, for the first time ever, partially predictable. Its behaviour, for the first time, has an identifiable variable: her.

Proposal 7.1-A (Dr. ██████████): Establish covert observation posts along confirmed Companion travel routes. Do nott engage. Do not approach. Observe only. Use the Companion's presence to map Entity 0's behavioural patterns, territorial boundaries, and, if possible, communication methods.

Proposal 7.1-B (Dr. ██████): Make contact with the Companion. Offer extraction. If she accepts, observe Entity 0's response. If she declines—and this is the part of the proposal that generated significant debate in committee—ask her to serve as a voluntary research asset. She has closer access to Entity 0 than any M.E.G. (or outside) operative has ever achieved. She is, in effect, already conducting the field study we have failed to execute fourteen times.

Proposal 7.1-C: ██████████████████████████████████ ██████████████████████████████████ ████████████████. This proposal was submitted anonymously. It has been rejected. The author is encouraged to identify themselves to their supervisor immediately.

7.2 — Proposal: Use the Companion to Contain Entity 0

STATUS: REJECTED (SEE BELOW)

If Entity 0 will not leave the Companion, then controlling the Companion's location is, theoretically, controlling Entity 0's location.

This proposal was rejected for the following reasons:

We do not know whether Entity 0's attachment to the Companion represents affection, possession, predation, or something outside human behavioural pattern. Assuming it is exploitable is assuming we understand it. We do not.

If Entity 0 perceives the Companion's removal as a threat, its response is unpredictable and potentially catastrophic. Given its documented combat capabilities—including the destruction of a Class 5 entity in under two minutes—the risk to extraction personnel is classified as ██████.

The Companion may not be a hostage. She may be there voluntarily. If so, forcible extraction raises ethical concerns that this department is not equipped to adjudicate.

██████████████████████████████████ ██████████████████████████████████ ████████████████. If this turns out to be accurate, containment is not merely inadvisable. It is ███████████████.

NOTE FROM OPERATIONS DIRECTOR ██████:

I'm going to be blunt. We have spent years and ██████ operatives trying to understand Entity 0. We've tried to catalogue its kills, map its territory and even document its evasion capabilities. And in all that time, the single greatest advance in our understanding of this entity has come from a civilian girl who, as far as we can tell, wandered in through a door that shouldn't exist and started treating an apex predator like a stray cat.

She has learned more about Entity 0 by being near it than we have learned in fourteen operations. I'm not comfortable with what that implies about our methodology. I'm even less comfortable with what it implies about Entity 0's capacity for selective trust.

Recommendation (to be forwarded to every agency looking into this Entity): observe. Do not intervene. Do not extract. Do not, under any circumstances, threaten the Companion's safety within Entity 0's perceptual range.

I've seen what it does to things that threaten what belongs to it.

I don't want to see what it would do to us.

SECTION 8 — OPEN QUESTIONS

The following questions remain unanswered. They are listed in order of departmental priority. Personnel with relevant information are instructed to report to Dr. ██████ immediately.

What is Entity 0? Not what does it look like. Not how does it behave. What IS it?

What does it want with the Companion? Protection implies investment. What is the return?

What is the entity's relationship to Level 0 itself? Is it an inhabitant, a guardian, a ██████, or something we do not have terminology for?

Why Bobby Franklin? Of all possible appearances, why this specific individual? Is is merely due to Companion's prior history with Franklin or █████████████?

The Companion has been in the Backrooms for an estimated ██████. Standard survival expectancy for an unaffiliated civilian without supplies is 1-3 days. She is alive and healthy. How? And more importantly, why?

██████████████████████████████████?

During Sighting S-44, observation team reported ██████████████████████████████████ ██████████████████████████████████. If this is accurate, does Entity 0 possess ████████████████? And if so, has the Companion been ██████?

Is Entity 0 capable of love? (This question was submitted by Junior Researcher ██████ and was initially struck from the record. It has been reinstated by order of Dr. ██████, who noted, and I quote: "It's the only question that actually matters.")

END OF DOSSIER

File Status: OPEN — NEVER CLOSED Next Mandatory Review: ████████████████

"We have been studying Entity 0 for years. I am no longer certain it has not been studying us for longer."

— Dr. ██████, final departmental memo before ████████████████

He checks the answering machine. The red light is steady. No messages. The last thing you said to him—actually said, out loud, in person—was I'm closing tonight, don't wait up. He'd grunted. Hadn't looked up from the TV. He remembers that now.

You stood in the doorway with your keys in your hand and your jacket half-on, and you looked at him. He realises now that you looked at him, really looked, like you were waiting for something, and he grunted.

He calls the store. Clark picks up, says you didn't show for your shift last night. Or the night before. Didn't call in either. Clark sounds worried, but not in a panicked way. Just the clipped, pragmatic worry of a man already calculating how to cover the hours. 

Bobby tries to sound like he already knew, like he's been handling it. He's the kind of boyfriend who would obviously know that his girlfriend's been missing for three days.

He hangs up, stands in the kitchen and looks at the apartment.

Your coffee mug is still on the drying rack. Your jacket's on the hook by the door. Your shoes—the white ones, the ones you wear everywhere, the ones he's made fun of a hundred times—are sitting by the mat. You didn't leave, didn't pack anything. You didn't take your shoes or anything at all.

Bobby files a missing persons report that afternoon. 

The cops tell him to come in the following morning.

The detective's name is Moreno. He's got a desk in the back of the precinct, a cup of coffee that's been sitting there long enough to develop a skin, and an expression that Bobby doesn't like. There’s no hostility. It’s the other thing, the worse one. Interest. 

“So,” Moreno begins, flipping open a notebook. “Three days.”

“Yeah.”

“And you noticed this morning?”

Bobby's jaw tightens. “I thought she was working doubles.”

Moreno lifts his eyes briefly. “For three days.”

“It's happened before,” Bobby says a little defensively. 

“Has it?” Moreno writes something down. Slow, purposeful, the pen moving like he wants Bobby to watch it, to feel the weight of each letter being recorded. “Walk me through the timeline, Bobby. When's the last time you actually saw her?”

Bobby tells him. The doorway. The jacket. The don't wait up. The grunt.

Moreno nods. Writes. “And after that? What'd you do that night?”

“Watched TV. Went to bed.”

“Alone?”

Bobby stares at him. Jesus Christ. “Yeah. Alone.”

“Okay.” Moreno takes a sip of his dead coffee. Sets it down. “We talked to your neighbours, Bobby. Just routine. The couple in 4B, the Nguyens, mentioned hearing arguments. Through the walls. More than once, over the past few months.” He looks up from the notebook. “You want to tell me about that?”

Bobby's chest goes tight. “Couples argue.”

“Sure they do. What were you arguing about?”

“I don't—stuff. Normal stuff. Dishes. Schedules.”

“They said it sounded pretty heated sometimes,” Moreno remarks. “Mrs Nguyen used the word volatile.”

Bobby feels something cold move through his stomach. “I never touched her. If that's what you're—”

“Nobody said that,” Moreno's voice is easy, perfectly calm. The practised calm of a man who's done this before. “But I've got a missing woman who was last seen by her boyfriend, who didn't notice she was gone for three days, whose neighbours describe an argumentative relationship. You can see why I need to be thorough.”

Bobby can see alright. Bobby can see exactly what this looks like from the outside, and the cold thing in his stomach turns to ice because it looks bad. It looks like exactly what it isn't, and there's no way to explain the difference between I was a shitty, negligent boyfriend who took her for granted and I hurt her without sounding like he's making excuses for both or covering his ass.

“We'd like to take a look at your camera equipment,” Moreno says. “Your footage. You're a camera guy, right? Clark at the store mentioned you're always filming.”

Bobby nods. Numbly.

They take the camera. They take the tapes, too. 

Bobby sits on the couch in the apartment and stares at the empty shelf where the equipment used to be, and feels naked in a way that has nothing to do with clothes. The camera was the last layer between himself and the world. They've taken it, and now there's just Bobby, sitting in an apartment full of evidence of his own failures, waiting for strangers to watch his footage and decide what kind of man he is.

They call him back in four days later. Moreno's got a different look on his face now. Still interested, but muddied, thoughtful. Like he's found something he wasn't expecting.

“We reviewed the tapes, Bobby,” Moreno says.

Bobby waits.

“There's a lot of footage of her,” Moreno says carefully. Neutral. Watching Bobby's face the way you'd watch a surface for ripples. “A lot. Some of it she doesn't seem to know about. You filming her while she's sleeping. While she's cooking. While she's reading.”

“The light was good,” Bobby says automatically, the old excuse, and it sounds hollow even to him.

Moreno lets the silence sit. Then, “Bobby. I've got a missing woman. Her boyfriend has hours of footage of her, some of it taken without her apparent knowledge. Her neighbours describe fights. The boyfriend didn't notice she was gone for seventy-two hours.” He leans forward, knotting his fingers on the table. “You see the picture I'm looking at, right? It doesn’t look good. If you want to tell me anything, I can help you—”

“That's not—I never hurt her. I was—”

“What were you?”

And Bobby opens his mouth to snap back with something defensive, sharp. Bobby, who uses his tongue like a blade when he feels cornered, rears up to go, and what comes out instead is:

“I love her.”

Not loved. There’s no past tense here. This isn’t careful distancing of a man constructing an alibi. Present tense, raw, graceless, blurted out like a cough. Like something expelled from deep in his lungs against his will. His voice breaks on her, and Bobby’s eyes burn. 

Moreno is staring at him, and Bobby is sitting in a police precinct with his chain tangled and his crop top wrinkled, his earring catching the overhead fluorescent light. And he looks, in that moment, exactly like what he is: a twenty-something-year-old asshole who didn't know what he had until the world seemingly swallowed it whole.

“I love her,” he repeats, quieter now. Like now that the word is out, he can't stop saying it, like the dam has cracked and the only thing behind it was this. “I love her, and I was—I wasn't good to her, I know that, okay? I know what it looks like, but I didn't—I would never—”

Moreno watches him for a long time. The precinct hums in the background. Phones, footsteps, murmur of voices.

They let him go. No evidence. No body. They're able to confirm his alibi, and ten again.

There’s no proof of anything except the fact that Robert Franklin is a man who films the woman he loves while she sleeps because he can't bring himself to tell her she's beautiful while she's awake.

He goes to the store that night.

Not because he thinks he'll find anything. The cops already searched it. Half-heartedly, briefly, the way you search a place when you've already decided the boyfriend did it, and the crime scene is somewhere else. 

They walked through the showroom and poked around the loading dock. Went down to the storage level, shone flashlights between the flatpack bookshelves and the plastic-wrapped headboards, and found nothing. Because there's nothing to find. 

Bobby just knows that this is the last place you were. 

That your hands touched the furniture down here. The inventory sheets, the shelving units, the boxes of cabinet hardware and drawer pulls you organised on the night shifts he couldn't be bothered to stay for. Your fingerprints are on everything. The ghost of your routine is embedded in the layout of this room. The way the boxes are stacked, the system you developed for sorting shipments by vendor, and the little handwritten labels in your writing on the bins. 

Bobby stands in the middle of it, and he can feel you. He can feel you the way you feel someone in a room they just left—the displaced air, the warmth fading from a surface, the sense that if he turned around fast enough, he'd catch the edge of you disappearing around a corner.

He sits down on the concrete floor. Puts his back against the wall. The far one, behind the shelving unit full of cabinet hardware, the one that feels different from the others in a way he can't articulate. Cooler. Thinner somehow. 

He doesn't plan to talk. But at one point, the silence gets too much, and it just… comes out. 

“Hey, baby. It's Bobby.”

His voice sounds strange in the empty room. Too loud, too small. Bouncing off the concrete and the flatpacks and coming back to him slightly changed, echoed.

“I don't know if you can hear me. I don't—this is stupid. This is really fucking stupid. Obviously, you can’t hear me because you’re not here. But I just—” He stops. Presses the back of his head against the wall. Stares at the ceiling. “The cops think I did something to you. They looked at me like—” He swallows. “I don't care about that. I don't care what they think. I just need you to know I'm looking. Okay? I'm looking, baby. I'm not gonna stop.”

The draft brushes against his palm. Cool. Steady. Like a pulse. 

He comes back the next night. And the next. And the next.

It becomes the only thing that makes sense. The apartment is a museum of his failures. Every unwashed dish, every unanswered question, every space where your things are slowly being buried under his carelessness. 

But the store is different. The store is where you were. The last place your body occupied space. Sitting in it feels like sitting in the shallow end of your absence rather than drowning in the deep. He can think down here. He can talk. He can say the things he should've said when you were standing in the doorway with your keys in your hand and your heart in your eyes, and he was looking at the TV.

Hey baby. It's me. Found one of your socks behind the dryer today. The fuzzy ones. I put it on the dresser. Just in case.

I keep thinking about Thanksgiving. When you burned the rolls, and I said, "guess we're going to my mom's next year", and you laughed, but you weren't really laughing. You were hurt. I knew, and I didn't fix it.

I'm sorry about the rolls. They were good. They were a little burnt, but they were good. You made them, and I should've eaten every single one.

Bobby pauses. Picks at the concrete with his thumbnail. The storage level smells like particleboard and cardboard. Somewhere deep in the room, he can feel that draft again. That impossible nowhere-breeze he still hasn’t found a source of.

I was thinking about that morning. In the kitchen. You were making breakfast, and you turned around with a spatula and asked if I wanted toast, and the light was behind you, and I—I felt this thing. This huge thing. Like my chest was going to crack open. And I said, "sure." I said SURE. You were standing there in my kitchen looking like that, and I felt the biggest thing I've ever felt, and I said sure and loaded film into my camera like it was nothing.

It wasn't nothing. It was everything. I just didn't know how to—I couldn't—

Bobby stops. Presses the heels of his hands into his eyes.

I was so scared you'd see how much I needed you and you'd leave. So I made you leave by not letting you see. That's the dumbest shits anyone's ever done. Baby. I'm so stupid.

He comes back every night. Even when there are no words. Even when he just sits with his hand on the wall and his eyes closed, breathing in the sawdust and the nothing-draft, feeling the concrete thrum against his palm like a second heartbeat.

No leads. No calls. No breaks in the case because there's no sightings, no signs of a break in, nothing. Eyes follow him around town, full of questions and suspicion. There's those who genuinely believe he did something to you. It's stupid, so fucking stupid. He's many thins, but he would never—

Except he did. He did hurt you. Just not in the way these people think.

So Bobby keeps coming because this room is the last place you were. And as long as he keeps sitting in it, as long as he keeps talking to the walls, you're not gone. 

You're just somewhere he hasn’t found you yet.

Month two.

The news spreads the way news does in a place like Santa Clara.

A slow seep through the neighbourhood, through the strip mall. The regulars who used to come to Clark's store for dining sets and bed frames and the occasional impulse-buy end table. A girl went missing. She worked there. The police questioned her boyfriend. No arrests, but you know.

People stop coming.

Not all at once. But the thin trickle becomes a drought. 

The regulars find reasons not to visit. Other stores, other errands, a sudden preference for the furniture place on Stevens Creek that doesn't have a missing-person case attached to it.

The showroom gets quieter. The displays gather a fine layer of dust that Clark used to wipe down every morning, and now he only gets to it every other day, then every third day, then whenever he remembers. Which is less and less because Clark is a man watching his business die and his marriage fracture. 

He can feel both things slipping through his fingers at the same speed, and the bourbon is the only thing that makes the slippage feel like someone else's problem.

So Clark hires Kat. 

Not because he needs a full-time replacement. Frankly, customer traffic no longer justifies it, but the showroom needs a body in it. A presence. Someone to make the store look like a place where things are still happening. Kat is bright and cheap, and she doesn't ask about the missing girl, at least not at first, and Clark is grateful for that.

Bobby notices her the first time he comes in for his nightly visit to the basement. 

She's behind the register, leaning against the counter with a pen behind her ear, doing something with a stack of delivery receipts. Radio plays something tuneful from a boombox she's brought from home. Dark hair. Quick smile. She looks up when the door chimes and gives him that particular once-over that Bobby used to live for. The slow sweep, the lingering, the way women's eyes always catch on the chain, the earring, the slice of toned stomach under the crop top. 

She says, “We're closed.”

“I know. I'm not shopping.”

She watches him walk past the display couches and the dining sets, then down the stairs, all with undisguised curiosity. Bobby doesn't turn around.

The second time, she asks.

“You're the boyfriend, right? Of the girl who—” She catches herself. Has the decency to look uncomfortable. “Sorry. Clark mentioned it.”

“Yeah.”

“I'm Kat,” she says. “I'm covering her shifts.”

“I know.”

Bobby keeps walking. Past the model bedrooms with their fake pillows and fake lamps, down the stairs, into the storage level where the real furniture waits in boxes. He sits on the floor. Presses his palm to the wall.

Hey baby. It's me again.

That night, back in the apartment, Bobby can't sleep. He lies on his side of the bed with his hand on your side and stares at the ceiling. The silence is so complete it has a texture, thick and too heavy. He gets up. Goes to the living room. Stands in front of the shelf where the cops put the tapes back, lined up in a neat row they were never in before.

He picks one up. Turns it over in his hands. The label is in his handwriting. A date, nothing else.

He tells himself he's looking for clues. That's the reason he gives himself as he threads the tape into the camera, plugs it into the TV, and sits on the floor with the remote in his hand.

The apartment is dark except for the blue wash of the screen. He's going to watch the footage with detective's eyes, with Moreno's eyes, looking for something everyone missed: a person in the background, a car that didn't belong, a moment where your face changed because you knew something was coming. He's going to be useful. He's going to be the kind of boyfriend who solves this.

And there you are. In the kitchen. In the morning light. Turning around with a spatula in your hand, your hair messy from sleep, one of his t-shirts hanging off your shoulder. You're saying something—he can't hear it over the lump in his throat, but he can read your lips, do you want toast—and the light is behind you, exactly the way he remembered. 

You're so beautiful, so real and so present on this tape that for a second Bobby forgets. For one perfect, idiot second, his body forgets you're gone and his hand almost lifts to touch the screen. 

Then the moment passes and you're still in the TV and he's still on the floor and the distance between those two things is the rest of his life.

He watches everything. All of it. Hours. The sleeping footage that made Moreno look at him like that. Bobby sees it now, sees what it looks like from the outside, and he also sees what it actually was: a man so stunned by the existence of this person in his bed that he needed the camera between them to survive it. 

You in the kitchen. You reading on the couch with your feet tucked under you, turning pages with one hand, the other hand resting on Bobby's thigh without thinking about it. He filmed that too, the hand, just the hand. Five minutes of your fingers against his jeans because he couldn't say you touching me is the best thing in my life, so Bobby recorded it instead. You at the store, sorting inventory, your lips moving along to the radio, and you catch the camera, and your face does that thing—the mock-exasperated smile, the Bobby, stop that you never really meant—and your eyes are warm. 

Your eyes are so fucking warm. Alive.

He watches until the tapes run out, and then Bobby rewinds them and watches again. He can't help it. The apartment fills with the sound of you. Your voice, your laugh, the particular way you said his name, Bobby, half-scolding and half-tender. For a few hours, the silence has a crack in it and something warm leaks through.

He starts watching them every night. Before the store, after the store, sometimes both. It becomes a ritual. Some sick twin devotions, the basement and the tapes, the wall and the screen, one hand pressed to concrete and the other pressing play.

Month three.

Kat starts leaving coffee on the counter for him. 

It's hot, and it's there every night when he walks in, balanced on the edge of the register next to a ceramic lamp that's been on display since before you vanished. 

She doesn't make a thing of it. Doesn't say I made this for you, or I thought you might want. It's just there. An object in his path. Bobby takes it because refusing would require a conversation he doesn't have the energy for.

She starts sitting on the stairs when he's in the basement. Not coming all the way down, just perching on the third step, legs crossed, chin in her hand, talking to him through the open stairwell. 

She tells him about her day. About the customers, mainly. The couple who spent three hours testing every sofa in the showroom and then bought a lamp, the woman who wanted to return a bed frame she'd clearly had for two years, and some guy who asked if they sold waterbeds. Clark apparently almost threw him out. She's funny, in a way that's different from you. Louder, broader, more direct. 

You were a scalpel. Kat's a blunt instrument, and right now Bobby is so hollowed out that even blunt force registers as contact.

He doesn't laugh. He doesn't encourage her. But he stops telling her to go away, and Kat reads that correctly as the only invitation Bobby knows how to extend right now.

It's the tapes that start to bother him first.

Not anything he can really name at first. It's more like a feeling. Particular unease of looking at something familiar and sensing, at the periphery, that it's shifted. He's watching the kitchen footage—the toast morning, his favourite, the one he's rewound so many times the tracking wobbles at the edges—and something feels off. Bobby stops the tape. Rewinds. Watches again.

You turn around with the spatula. The light is behind you. You say do you want toast. Everything is exactly the same.

Except your face.

Bobby leans closer to the screen. Squints. Your face is… fine. It's your face. Your eyes, your mouth, the way your hair falls. It's you. But there's… something. Some flicker of wrongness so faint it's less than a shadow. Like the difference between a photograph and a photocopy of a photograph. The information is all there. It's just one generation removed from real.

He tells himself it's the tape. Old footage, cheap equipment, the kind of VHS degradation that happens when you rewind the same section a hundred times. He tells himself it's his eyes, his exhaustion, the fact that he's watching the same clips at two in the morning in a dark apartment obsessively. 

His brain is doing what brains do when they're tired and desperate: finding patterns in the static.

He believes it. For a while. He presses play.

One night, Kat is quiet for longer than usual. Bobby can feel her watching him from the stairs, her chin on her knees, the stairwell light behind her making her silhouette sharp.

“You loved her a lot, huh,” she says. Soft. Not a question.

Bobby goes rigid. His hand is flat on the wall. The draft tickles against his palm.

He turns his head. Looks at her. And whatever's on his face, he knows it’s not warm. It's the Bobby that bites, the one who gets mean, and Kat sees it happen, feels the temperature drop. The wall goes up behind his expression like a bulkhead slamming shut.

“I still love her,” he says, cold and flat. Corrective. Present tense.

He turns back to the wall. Kat is quiet for a long time. Then she gets up and goes back upstairs, and Bobby hears her footsteps cross the showroom floor above him. He closes his eyes, pressing his forehead to the concrete. He hates himself for being cruel to one more person who didn't deserve it or ask him but did you do it?

But he can't— 

He can't let her use the past tense. He can't let anyone use the past tense. Because that means it's over, and it's not over. It's not. You're somewhere, he can feel it. 

Bobby is a man sitting on a concrete floor talking to nobody, and the only woman who ever mattered to him is gone, and the last thing he gave her was a fucking grunt.

He can't live in that version. He won't.

Month four.

Bobby starts going through the inventory records. 

Your handwriting is everywhere. The logs, the labels on the bins, the sticky notes on the shelving units, reminding Clark which shipments need to go out first. He sits in the storage level with the binder in his lap and traces your letters with his fingertip. He can hear your voice in the loops and slants. The way you wrote like you talked, quick and slightly messy, always abbreviating things so he had to ask you to translate.

The tapes are getting worse.

He can't deny it anymore. The wrongness he felt at month three has deepened into something visible, a decay he doesn't need to squint to see. 

Your face has lost something in the kitchen footage. Nothing he could point to, nothing a stranger who'd never met you would notice. But Bobby has watched this clip a thousand times, and he knows the terrain of your face the way a sailor knows coastline.

Something has shifted. 

Your eyes are the right colour, but the light behind them is dimmer, muted, like watching a candle through frosted glass. Your mouth moves and the words come out (do you want toast), but there's a fraction-of-a-second delay. The audio arriving just a breath after the lips, and it gives your voice a quality that makes the hair on Bobby's arms stand up. A dubbing. A sense that someone else is speaking through you, almost perfectly synchronised but not quite. 

He goes through the other tapes. One by one. Methodical. The sleeping footage first. And you're there, you're sleeping, but the quality of your stillness is wrong. Too still. A person breathing doesn't look like that, doesn't have that uncanny smoothness, that mannequin-serenity. 

The footage of you at the store next. Sorting inventory, lips moving to the radio is the worst affected so far. Your hands look right, but they move in a way that's almost, almost correct. The way a marionette's hands move when the puppeteer is very good. Bobby watches your fingers sort through drawer pulls and cabinet hardware, and he knows that those are not the hands that touched him.

He doesn't tell anyone. Who the hell would he even tell? Moreno? Hey, detective, the girl on my tapes is turning into something else? Yeah, same one that went missing and everyone thinks I secretly killed! His mom? Terrence? They already think he's losing it. Or, worse, they would think he’s high again.

They already use that voice with him now. The careful tone people use when they're managing a dangerous animal. This would be the thing that tips it, the thing that sends Bobby from grieving boyfriend to guy who cracked.

He starts making a list of his failures instead. 

An erosion in reverse. Every day, some new memory surfaces, a moment he discarded when it happened and now can't stop replaying. Each one is worse than the last because each one is a place where he had a choice and chose wrong and didn't even realise it. Or maybe he did. And that’s worse.

The night you came home excited about something—a movie, a book, something a friend said, he can't even remember what it was, and that fact alone makes him want to put his fist through drywall—and you'd been lit up, talking fast, gesturing, and he'd been reviewing footage on the couch.

He'd said uh-huh without looking up. Not even once. Not once during your entire story did he lift his eyes from the viewfinder. You trailed off mid-sentence and went quiet, and Bobby hadn't looked up then either.

He tries to find that moment on tape. He knows he was filming that night. The camera was always running, always capturing, the viewfinder his permanent excuse for not being present. He scrubs through the footage looking for it. Looking for your face lit up. Looking for the moment you dimmed.

He finds the timestamp. And what Bobby sees makes his stomach drop.

You're sitting on the couch. He can tell it's you by the posture, the clothes, the way you're tucked into the corner cushion with your legs folded. But your face. Your face is… smeared. Like a thumbprint pressed across wet paint. The features are there, technically. But only technically. Eyes, mouth, nose. But they've lost their arrangement, their specificity.

The uniqueness that makes a face your face instead of just a face. 

Bobby is looking at you, and he can’t tell what you look like. He’s lived with you, slept beside you, fucked you in every spot in your shared apartment, filmed you obsessively for months, and yet he’s looking at a tape from four months ago, and he can’t reconstruct you.

The audio is worse. Your voice—the one he knows better than his own, the one that said his name like a bell, half-scolding and half-tender—is distorted.

Vowels flattened, consonants dissolved. That familiar melody of your speech now reduced to a low warbling tone that doesn't sound like language anymore. It sounds like a recording of a recording of a recording. Each new generation losing fidelity, losing you, until what's left is just the shape of where a voice used to be.

Bobby ejects the tape. His hands are shaking so hard he almost drops it. He puts it back on the shelf and sits on the couch in the dark and doesn't move for an hour.

He sits with the inventory binder the next night and reads your handwriting and says to the wall:

Something's happening to you, baby. I can't—I don't know how to explain it. But something's happening to the tapes, and I think it means something's happening to you. I need you to hold on. Okay? I need you to hold on because I'm still here, and I'm not leaving. I need you to still be you when I find you.

I think I got scared of how much I needed you. So I stopped letting myself need you. And that's not an excuse. I know that's not an excuse.

The truth is, I wanted to be there so much that it was destroying me. I wanted you so much it made me fucking mean. I loved you in a way I couldn't control, and I've always been an idiot who quits everything. Who gives up when things get too big and scary. You were the one thing that made my hands shake, and I hated it, and I needed it. I needed you because you saw me. I didn't know how to need something without resenting it.

So I resented you. For making me believe in myself. For making me need something other than the weed. And I showed it by turning away and turning away and turning away until you thought I didn't feel anything at all, when the reality is I felt everything. I felt too much. I've always felt too much, and I've never once known what to do about it except hide behind the camera and make a dumb joke and let the moment pass.

He pauses. Slams the binder shut. Runs his hand over the cover where your coffee ring stains the cardboard.

I should've told you about the toast morning. The spatula. The light behind you. I should've put the camera down and told you right then.

I should've told you every morning.

Baby. I can still see your handwriting. I need to—I need that to mean you're still somewhere. That this is just the tapes. That the tapes are old and I'm tired and you're fine, wherever you are, you're fine and you look like you and you sound like you and when I find you I'll know your face.

Month five.

Kat touches his arm.

It happens on a Wednesday. She's handing him the coffee, and her fingers brush his wrist and stay there. A half-second too long. Warm. Intentional.

Bobby stares at her hand. Looks at her. She doesn't look away.

“You know,” she says cautiously, “you don't have to sit down there alone every night. You could stay up here. Sit on one of the display couches. They're actually pretty comfortable for fake living rooms.” She smiles. Not the interested once-over from the first night. Softer now, more careful.

Bobby takes the coffee. Goes downstairs.

His pager buzzes against his hip later that night. He unclips it, tilts it toward the light. Kat's number. She must've pulled it from the staff contact sheet Clark keeps.

He looks at the little green screen for a long time. Clips the pager back to his belt. Presses his forehead to the wall.

That night, at home, he puts in the toast tape. It's become a test now, a compulsion. He checks the way you'd check a wound, needing to see if it's gotten worse, even though looking makes it worse too. He sits on the floor in front of the TV and watches the kitchen footage load.

The spatula is there. The counter. The window with the morning light. The t-shirt hanging off one shoulder. Everything in the frame is crisp, real, and correctly rendered.

Except there's no one holding the spatula.

Bobby's breath hitches. He leans forward, hands shaking. Rewinds. Plays it again.

The spatula lifts. Turns. The t-shirt shifts on a shoulder that isn't there. Or is there, maybe, but wrong. A smudge of colour where a body should be, a heat-shimmer distortion where your outline used to sit. The light comes through the window and falls on the kitchen counter and on the empty space where you stood, and there is something in that space.

Not nothing, or blank tape, but a presence that has no edges, no features, no face. A blur. A smear. The visual equivalent of a word on the tip of your tongue that won't come.

The audio says — — toast — and then dissolves into a sound that Bobby can only describe as the noise a voice makes when it's being pulled apart from the inside. Each syllable stretches thinner and thinner until it snaps, and what's left is a low, sustained hum that sounds like buzzing lights in an empty hallway.

Bobby presses stop. Ejects the tape.

He goes to the shelf. Pulls another. The one where you're reading on the couch, your hand on his thigh. He puts it in.

Your hand is gone. His thigh is there. Bobby can see his own jeans, the denim folded at the knee. That specific wear pattern on the left leg. But the hand that used to rest on it has dissolved into a faded wash, a blurry disturbance on the surface of the image, like someone pressed their palm to a fogged window and then the fog closed over the print.

He puts in another. The store footage. You sorting inventory.

The bins are being sorted by no one. Cabinet hardware moves through the air. Drawer pulls lift and settle into containers by themselves, organised by a system invented by a person the tape can no longer render. The radio plays in the recording. Bobby can hear the music. Unchanged. But the voice that used to sing along to it is gone. Replaced by a low, pulsing tone that rises and falls in a pattern that almost, almost resembles the melody you used to hum, if he listens hard enough, if Bobby presses his ear to the speaker and closes his eyes and believes—

He can't. He can't believe it hard enough. The tape runs, and the inventory sorts itself. The radio plays somewhere underneath it all in a frequency that used to be your voice.

Bobby puts every tape in, one by one. Every single one. And on every single one, you’re fading. The early tapes—the oldest ones, the ones from before the store, from the first months—are the worst. 

On those, you’re gone entirely. The frame exists, as does the light. But the space you occupied is smooth and empty, the image healing the wound of your absence like skin closing over a wound.

Reality itself seems to be deciding you were never there and quietly, methodically, is editing you out.

On the very last tape he checks, the most recent, he can still see you. Barely. A silhouette that won't resolve. A shape in the doorway that could be a person or could be a trick of the light. He pauses the tape and stares at the shape, and it looks like you the way a cloud looks like a face. If you want it to, if you squint hard enough and ignore the parts that don't match.

Bobby sits on the floor, holding the remote, staring at the paused frame. He understands, with a certainty that bypasses logic and settles directly into his bones, that you’re being erased. Not just from his life. Not just from the apartment, the store, or the neighbourhood that forgot you. From reality. From any evidence that you existed at all.

The tapes were his proof. Not for Moreno, or the cops, but for himself. Proof that you were real. That the toast morning happened. That your hand rested on his thigh. Love, in all its messy, imperfect shape between you, was real. That you sang along to the radio and burned rolls at Thanksgiving. That you stood in doorways waiting for him to look up. For once in his life, to just look up and see you. 

He filmed you because he couldn't tell you he loved you, and thought the films would be enough. They were going to be the evidence he'd have forever, the record of what he felt even when he couldn't say it aloud.

And now even that’s being taken.

He doesn't go to the store that night. He goes straight to the basement and puts his whole body against the wall. Not just his hand. His whole body, chest, cheek and palms flat against the concrete. Maybe he’s going insane, finally, properly insane, but he talks until his voice gives out.

Don't go. Whatever's happening, whatever this is—please. Don't go. I know I didn't earn you. I know I don't get to ask you to stay when I didn't give you a reason to stay. But I’m asking. I'm begging. Please.

I can barely remember your face, baby.

I looked at the tapes, and you're not—you're going away. You're going away, and I can't stop it. The last version of your face I have in my head is from the doorway, the night you left, and I didn't even LOOK at it. I fucking grunted. You were looking at me, and I was looking at the TV. Now your face is disappearing from my own tapes, and the last real look I had at you I wasted on a GRUNT.

Baby. Please don't make me forget what you look like.

The wall breathes against him. The draft. The nowhere-breeze, cooler than the room, steady, almost rhythmic. Like breathing. Like something on the other side pressing back, watching him.

Bobby lifts his head but he's alone down here.

He stays until morning anyway.

Month six.

The apartment is starting to forget you.

Your shampoo ran out first. Bobby couldn't bring himself to buy more, so the shower shelf has a gap now.

Your magazines are buried under his mail, his camera equipment that's migrated back to every flat surface because there's nobody to complain about it. The coffee mug—your mug, the one on the drying rack—he put it in the cabinet. High shelf. Behind his. He can't see it when he opens the door, but he knows it's there. 

The tapes are blank.

Completely blank. Clean, smooth, unrecorded type of blank. As if the camera was never pointed at anything, as if the record button was never pressed. Hours and hours of footage simply un-happened. 

Bobby put in the toast tape last week, and what played was thirty minutes of soft grey nothing. The gentle hiss of virgin magnetic tape, the sound of a medium that has never held information. He put it in the camera, connected it to the TV, and watched nothing. Rewound it. Watched nothing again, ejected it, held it in his hands, turned it over and read his own handwriting on the label. 

The date, just the date. The label is the only proof left that something was once on this tape, because the tape itself has forgotten.

All of them. Every single one. He checked them all, one after another, on a Saturday afternoon with the curtains drawn. By the time Bobby reached the last one, he wasn't even surprised. Just hollow. The shelves are full of labelled cassettes that now contain nothing.

A library of blanks. An archive of absence.

He has no pictures of you. 

He realises this with a physical lurch, sitting on the floor surrounded by dead tapes. He has no pictures of you. 

Bobby the camera guy, Bobby who filmed everything, Bobby who pointed the lens at you while you slept because he couldn't survive the sight of you without a barrier, and somehow, he has no proof you exist. The tapes are blank. He never took photographs because the camera was always rolling. And the only image of your face he has left is the one in his head, and that one is fading too. 

Just the ordinary human erosion. The way memory smooths out detail over time. Six months of absence turns a face into an impression, an atmosphere, a feeling-where-a-face-used-to-be.

He remembers your eyes. He thinks. He remembers warmth, colour, the way they changed in kitchen light, and the blue wash of the TV at midnight. But he doesn't remember their exact shape. Doesn't remember if the left one was slightly different from the right. 

The details are blurry; the tapes can't tell him anymore, and no one else can, either. You’re being unmade—from the record, from the world, from his own goddamn memory—and Bobby is the man who was supposed to preserve you, who pointed a camera at you for years, and he couldn't even do that right.

He still goes to the store. Every night. Without fail. 

Even when it rains, or when he's sick, or when his hands shake on the steering wheel, driving down at eleven PM. He sits on the floor, and he talks. Sometimes he brings the coffee, your order, and a paper cup from the place on El Camino that makes it the way you like best.

Bobby sets it on the concrete beside him like a place setting at a table for two, and it goes cold while he talks. Eventually, he pours it out in the utility sink by the loading dock, rinses the cup and drives home.

It's getting harder to believe.

He can feel it. 

Faith eroding the way your shampoo scent eroded from the pillow, the way you eroded from the tapes, gradually, then suddenly. Six months. People don't come back after six months. The cops have functionally closed the case. 

Bobby's mom called and talked around the subject for forty minutes before finally saying honey, maybe it's time to— and Bobby hung up on her. His buddy Terrence sat him down at a bar and said, awkwardly, carefully, the way everyone talks to Bobby now, man, I know you don't want to hear this, but— and Bobby walked out before he could finish the sentence.

He knows what they're going to say. He knows because he's been saying it to himself at three in the morning, lying on his side of the bed with his hand on the cold spot you should be, a thought looping in his brain: she's not coming back. She's not coming back.

But Bobby goes to the store. And he sits on the floor. He puts his hand on the wall. The draft is still there—that impossible nowhere-breeze, cool against his palm—and it feels like breathing. Bobby presses his whole body against the concrete.

This space is the last thing that still holds you. The tapes gave you up. The apartment gave you up. The neighbourhood, the cops, his friends, his mother, everyone has let go. Bobby presses himself against the wall every night because this is the one place in the world that still has you in it. The last surface that carries your imprint, and he’ll not leave it. 

He will not let the last proof of you go.

Bobby thinks about who he was seven months ago, and the contempt is so total it's almost cleansing. 

A twenty-something-year-old asshole in a crop top who thought he was too cool to say I love you, who hid behind a camera lens because looking at things through glass was easier than looking at them with his bare, stupid, cowardly eyes.

He had a girl who made him breakfast and stayed up waiting for him. Who asked do you even want to be here anymore and answered her with don't be dramatic because the truth was too enormous and too terrifying to fit through his teeth.

The camera was supposed to be the thing that kept you. The proof, the record, the insurance policy against loss. He filmed you because he couldn't hold you, and now the film is empty. His arms are empty too, and the only thing left is a dusty basement with a strange wall and a man who doesn't deserve the comfort of it.

Robert Franklin, who quit everything, who let every good thing in his life rot through neglect and cowardice—Robert Franklin refuses to quit this. 

This is the one thing he will hold onto with both hands. Because if he lets go, he has to look at who he is without it, and that person has nothing. That someone is an idiot with a camera and a crop top sitting in an empty apartment full of blank tapes, where he ground something beautiful down to dust because he was too chickenshit to be soft.

So he goes. Every night. He goes.

Month seven.

Clark is drunk.

Bobby can tell before he's through the door. 

The showroom lights are on, but the sign is flipped to CLOSED, and the radio's playing louder than usual from somewhere in the back. When Bobby makes his way past the dining displays, he finds Clark sitting in the leather recliner. The expensive floor model, the one that's been here since the store opened, with a bottle of Jim Beam wedged between his thigh and that look on his face. 

The one Bobby sees in the mirror. The look of a man whose life is falling apart.

“Bobby.” Flat. Not unfriendly. Voice of a man who's been drinking past sloppy and into something cold and brittle on the other side. “Right on time.”

“Clark.” Bobby eyes the bottle. “Where's Kat?”

“Sent her home early.” Clark takes a long, gulping drink. He's still wearing his work shirt, that same button-down he always wears, but it's untucked and the collar's stained. He looks like he's been in that recliner for a while. “Sit down.”

“I'm going downstairs.”

“No.” Another wet gulp. His eyes are red but steady. “You're not. That's what I need to talk to you about.”

Bobby stops.

“Linda kicked me out,” Clark says conversationally. The way he'd talk about lumber prices or a late shipment. He gestures around the showroom with the bottle. “So I'll be staying here. Back office. Maybe downstairs, if I can clear space between the Scandinavian imports.” The joke almost lands. Almost. “Which means I need the room, Bobby. All of it.”

“You're—what?”

“I'm saying you can't come here anymore.”

The words land like a slap. Bobby's hand tightens on the strap of his camera bag.

“Clark—”

“Seven months.” 

And there it is. That thing that happens when Clark drinks, when the bourbon strips away the politeness and the it's not my place and the careful middle-aged-man diplomacy, and what's left is just the raw compressed anger of a man who's been swallowing his own resentment for months.

Clark is a man who holds everything down until the whiskey lifts the lid and whatever's underneath comes out scalding.

“Seven months of you in my basement. Seven months of—do you know what's happened to this place since your girlfriend disappeared? Do you? Because I do. I watch it every day. I watch the customers not come in. I watch the phone not ring. I watch the neighbourhood look at my store like it's a goddamn crime scene and take their money to Stevens Creek because nobody wants to buy a dining set from the place where a girl vanished.” Clark's voice is rising, a deep rumbling anger spilling outwards. “I built this store. And now I'm sleeping in it because my ungrateful wife thinks I'm a failure and my customers think I'm cursed and the only person who walks through my door every night is you, Bobby, sitting on my floor, talking to my wall—”

“That's not my fault —”

“She's not down there.” Clark slams the bottle on the end table. It cracks the mahogany finish, and he doesn't notice or doesn't care. “She's not in the walls, or the ceiling or the goddamn floor, son. She's not inside a goddamn flatpack bookshelf.”

Bobby sucks in a breath. “You don't know that. Nobody does.”

“Yeah, I do.” 

Clark leans forward. Red-eyed. Steady. And the thing he's been holding between his teeth for months comes out. The ugly thing that isn't about Bobby at all, it's about Clark, about a store that was failing before you ever disappeared and a marriage that was cracking before the customers stopped coming.

A man who needs someone to blame because the alternative is looking in the mirror and seeing his own fingerprints on everything that's broken. And right now, tonight, drunk and newly homeless and sitting in a recliner in a showroom full of furniture nobody's buying, Clark has found his someone.

“She's either dead,” Clark says, and the word just hangs there, settling on Bobby's skin like hot oil spilling over— “or she left you. And either way, son. Either way. You need to stop. Because I can't have you down there anymore. I can't have this—this haunting—attached to my store. I'm trying to save what's left, and you sitting in my basement every night is—”

He stops himself. A crack appears in Clark’s anger, a fissure where the sober Clark underneath can see what the drunk Clark is doing. Using Bobby's grief to deflect from his own failure. Blaming a missing girl for a business that was haemorrhaging money long before she vanished, for a wife who kicked him out because Clark worked sixty-hour weeks and never once asked how her day was.

Clark knows. Underneath the bourbon, he knows. And the knowing makes his face twist with both sadness and fury.

“Bobby.” His voice changes. Drops. The anger drains out of it like water from a cracked glass, leaving only the exhaustion underneath. Clark rubs his eyes with one hand, and suddenly, he looks old. Older than he is, tired in a way that has nothing to do with the hour. “I didn't—that came out wrong. I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said it like that.”

Bobby doesn't hear him.

Because Bobby is already moving. Past the display couches and the model bedrooms with their fake pillows and fake lives. He shoulder clips the corner of a dining table hard enough to shift it on the showroom floor, and the door chimes behind him when he rips it open.

The night air hits him, and he's in the parking lot, his hands are on his knees, and he's breathing in short, ragged, tearing bursts that feel like they're coming from somewhere below his lungs. 

Somewhere that's been sealed shut for seven months and has just been cracked open with the words she's either dead or she left you.

Dead or she left you.

Dead.

Or she left you.

He can't fucking breathe. He can't—the air is right there. Santa Clara night air, warm and full of eucalyptus and car exhaust, but he can't get it into his lungs. Because Clark said dead, and that word is a door Bobby has refused to open for seven months, and now it's open, it's wide fucking open. 

And behind it is a version of reality where you’re in the ground somewhere and the last thing he ever said to you was a grunt and your last memory of him is the back of his head and the blue light of the television and the sound of a man who couldn't be bothered to look up.

And the tapes are blank. And your face is gone. And there is no record anywhere in the world that you existed except the label on a cassette in Bobby's handwriting and in a basement he's just been locked out of.

“Bobby. Bobby, wait—”

Kat. Coming around the side of the building, car keys in her hand. She didn't go home. She was sitting in her car, headlights off, engine off, just sitting there, and she's been doing that, he knows she's been doing that, waiting for him, watching the door. And he's never said anything because acknowledging it would mean acknowledging everything it implies.

“Bobby, hey, stop, are you okay? I heard him through the door, what did he—”

Bobby straightens up. Pivots toward her. And he knows—somewhere in the functioning part of his brain, in the part that isn't currently on fire—that she doesn't deserve what’s coming. She's been nothing but kind.

Coffee on counters, stairs and parking lots and pager numbers he never called back. She never once asked for anything in return. She’s a good person standing in a parking lot trying to help a man who’s bleeding out from a wound she didn't inflict.

But the thing inside Bobby right now is not rational. It's not kind. It's the wounded animal, the cornered dog, the part of Robert Franklin that has always turned his pain into teeth and aimed them at whoever's closest because the alternative is feeling it. And he…

He can't feel it; if he feels it right now, he’ll come apart on this asphalt, and he doesn't know if he'll come back together again.

“Don't do that. Don't chase me. Don't wait in the parking lot. Don't leave me coffee. Don't—” His voice cracks, and he hates it. Hates the sound of himself breaking in front of her. Another woman who's being kind to him, and he's going to ruin it with his inability to do anything with tenderness except flinch from it. “I'm not going to fuck you, Kat. Alright? Is that what you need to hear? My girl is missing. The girl I love is fucking missing, and I don't know where she is, and I can't—I can't do this. Whatever you think this is going to become. I can't.”

He presses the heel of his hand into his eye. Hard. Grinding the tears back because Bobby doesn't cry in front of people. Even though he's been doing it alone on concrete for seven months, even though the irony—Bobby Franklin pushing away the person trying to be there for him while grieving the person he pushed away by not being there—is so perfect and so cruel it feels engineered. Like the universe is holding up a mirror and saying see? You're doing it again. You learned nothing, idiot.

He knows. He knows he's doing it again. He can't stop doing it.

“I can't,” he rasps. Quiet, broken. “I'm sorry.”

Kat stands still. Her keys dangle from one finger, catching the orange glow of the streetlight. She doesn't step back. Doesn't cry or get angry or tell him to go fuck himself, though she definitely should. Bobby almost wishes she would because it would give him someone to push against.

The tapes are blank, and your face is a smear. Reality is closing over the hole you left like water closing over a stone, and soon there’ll be no evidence you were ever here at all except a man in a parking lot who can't stop saying your name in the present tense.

Kat shifts her keys to her other hand. Takes one step closer. Not touching. Just closer.

She looks at him, and she says, quietly, softly, “I don't need you to love me, Bobby.”

Quiet. Simple. Like she's telling him the time.

Bobby's mouth opens. Closes. His hand drops from his face. The parking lot is quiet. Only the buzzing streetlight fills the silence. 

He looks at her, and he looks wrecked, he knows. Absolutely wrecked, hollowed out and scraped clean from last seven months, standing in a place where the only options are forward into something he's not ready for or backwards into a basement he's just been locked out of, and he doesn't say yes.

But he doesn't walk away, either.

you let him walk close. you let him hum. let yourself pretend, in the amber wash of light, that the eyes are the right shade of blue and the hands are the right temperature and the thing sitting next to you in the hallway that smells like mildew is just a boy who loves you and not a question you can't answer.

but you maintain it in the beginning. the mild suspicion. the distance. the tension when his head tilts at that angle that necks don't do. the way you catch yourself leaning in and pull back and watch something flicker across his face (hurt? performance of hurt? does it matter when it looks the same?) you keep one hand on the wall at all times. metaphorically. ready to run. because you know what he is even if you don't know WHAT he is. because what if the warmth is borrowed and the attention is replicated?

and somewhere above this fluorescent nightmare your actual boyfriend is probably not even wondering where you went.

and then, one day, you turn a corner on level 0 and there she is.

and she looks like you.

but better. the way Better Bobby is bobby but more.

she's you with the contrast turned up. you, but rested. you, but without the dark circles and the bitten nails and the desperate grateful look you get when Better Bobby does something thoughtful. that pathetic oh-god-someone-noticed-me expression that you hate on your own face.

she's you the way you look in the mirror when the lighting is perfect and you're having the best day of your life, which, for the record, you're NOT having. because you're standing on wet carpet under buzzing lights looking at a thing that crawled out of the walls wearing your face like a sunday dress.

and she looks at Better Bobby.

and she SMILES.

not your smile. yours is still a little tight, still cautious and always halfway to flinching because the last person you loved taught you that attention is temporary and warmth gets revoked without warning.

hers is wide and warm and full and it reaches her eyes (your eyes, YOUR eyes but without the hurt behind them) and she tilts her head and says "hi, bobby" in your voice but lighter. your voice without the weight of being someone's afterthought for the better part of a year.

and here's where your brain should be going: that's an entity. that's a threat. we need to leave.

here's where your brain ACTUALLY goes: why is she looking at him like that?

because she IS. she's looking at Better Bobby with an openness you have never once allowed yourself. she's looking at him without the flinch. without the constant background calculation of is this real or is he going to get bored of me too. she's looking at him like she's never been neglected. like she's never sat on a bed waiting for someone to look up from a screen and notice she'd been waiting. like she doesn't carry the specific, learned knowledge that love has a half-life and attention decays and eventually everyone stops seeing you.

Better You doesn't doubt him.

Better You isn't waiting for him to lose interest.

Better You is what you would be if real bobby hadn't taught you that being loved is a temporary condition.

and the thing that absolutely dismantles you, the thing that sends you into a jealousy spiral so irrational it should be clinically studied, is watching Better Bobby's reaction.

because he looks at her. he looks at this perfected version of you, this you-without-the-damage, this you who would never flinch when he reaches for her, who would never pull back at the last second, would never look at his kindness with suspicion because the last boy with that face stopped being kind. she doesn't know that, she's never been un-loved, she's BETTER—

and his head tilts. the not-quite-human angle. the one that means he's processing something new.

and you can see him considering it.

and what hits you isn't just jealousy. it's recognition. it's the pattern completing. because you've been here before, haven't you?

not in the backrooms. in your own bedroom. watching real bobby's attention slide away from you toward his camera, his friends, anything, everything. the whole world more interesting than the girl sitting right there.

you've been the person someone grows bored of. been the version that isn't enough. and now here, in the one place where something was finally paying attention to you, finally choosing you, finally making you feel like you were worth staying awake for... here comes the upgrade. here comes the 2.0. a you without the flinch or the doubt or the desperate, needy wounded thing living behind your ribs and of COURSE he's going to choose her. of course. because that's how this works. that's how this ALWAYS works.

you're hard to love and here is the proof, smiling with your mouth.

and what comes out of your mouth is not "bobby, that's an entity, we need to go." what comes out of your mouth, before your brain can catch it, in a voice that is embarrassingly, revealingly sharp, is:

"bobby."

one word. aimed at him. not at her. because you're not afraid of what Better You will do. you're afraid that the one thing in the universe that chose to love you is about to unchoose. just like the original did. you're afraid you're about to watch it happen again, in real time, wearing the same face both times.

Better Bobby looks at you.

glances at her.

looks at you.

and something shifts.

it's small. you'd miss it if you weren't watching him with the intensity of someone whose entire emotional survival depends on what happens in the next ten seconds. his expression (bobby's expression, that open curious, considering look) doesn't change. but something behind it does. like a building settling. a decision being made in a room you can't quite see.

he takes your hand.

his fingers are the wrong temperature. they're always the wrong temperature. too cool in a place that's always too warm, like touching something that exists at a slight remove from the physics of the room. you know this hand. you've memorised this hand without meaning to. the shape of bobby's fingers rebuilt in whatever Better Bobby is made of, and when they close around yours you feel the strength in them held in check. gentle. chosen.

he turns around.

Better You is still standing there. still smiling. still wearing your face without any of the cracks in it. and Better Bobby looks at her (at it) and something happens to his eyes.

the blue goes out.

not like a light switching off. a light being swallowed. bobby's blue, that specific clear blue you fell in love with in a hallway between second and third period, drains out of his irises and what's behind it is black. not dark brown. not deep blue. pure black.

the kind of black that doesn't reflect light because it's older than light. the kind of black that was here before the backrooms were here, a black that's been watching from inside bobby's blue eyes this entire time, patient and ancient. so fundamentally other that your hand tightens in his involuntarily because your body understands something your brain is still processing: you are holding hands with something that existed before the concept of hands.

and he says, in bobby's voice but emptied of everything warm:

"don't follow. or i'll rip you apart."

flat. cold. the way you'd state a law of physics. a description. a factual account of what will happen, delivered with the same casual certainty as "water is wet" or "sky is blue." his voice doesn't do the bobby crack. there is nothing human in it at all. this is the thing under the bobby. the thing that BUILT the bobby, speaking from behind the mask without bothering to move the mouth right. it's older and colder and more vast than anything that's ever said your name softly in the dark while you were trying to sleep.

Better You stops smiling.

the black blinks out. the blue comes back. bobby's blue. warm, familiar, slightly wrong in the way you've gotten used to. the wrongness you've started to find almost-comforting because at least it's consistent. at least it's YOUR wrongness, the wrongness you know. chose.

he looks at you. bobby's face. bobby's almost-smile. the one that crinkles the corners of his eyes and makes you forget, for a moment, about the black.

"coming, baby?" he says, like nothing happened. like he didn't just flash the void behind his face. like his hand in yours isn't a claim, a territory marker, a line drawn in wet carpet.

and you realise three things simultaneously:

one. he chose you. not better you. not the version without the damage. you. the flinching, doubting, suspicious, wounded, difficult, real you. whatever his reasons are (love, obsession, malfunction, possession, something without a human name) he chose the hard one.

two. he will kill for it. the thing in the hallway wearing your face is an entity that could probably survive most of what the backrooms throw at it. he looked at it with ancient black nothing-eyes and said i will unmake you and meant it.

three. you don't know if being chosen by something like that is salvation or the most beautiful trap ever built.

and you hold his hand (wrong temperature, wrong pressure, wrong wrong wrong) and you keep walking.

The shutter retracted up with a clatter, the three of you ducking in one by one before Kat dragged it back down to the floor, twisting the key at the bottom to lock it.

You coughed as you stood, the air thick with the faint smell of bleach and old lint. It was to be expected from a furniture store you supposed, especially one that didn’t get much movement from well.. anyone.

“Hey is there a light in here?” You spoke through the darkness, turning to catch the silhouettes standing behind you.

“This way.”

An arm hooked around your waist before you could answer, and through the dim light you made it out who it was. A scent of roses and cocoa butter covered the smell of pot, and the coolness of her bangles rubbed against your arm as Kat angled you both across the floor.

You made it a few paces to the back wall before a gold glow lit up from the far corner.

Bobby.

He fumbled with the string of an antique lamp, unwrapping the straps of his camera as he set it onto a nightstand, turning to face you both with a scrunch in his brow.

“Does Clark really sleep on these things? They’re fuckin’ hard.” His hand pressed into the mattress, shoving it up and down before it bounced back into his hand.

“Don’t complain about it now, it was your idea. And yeah.. he does..” Kat looked up at him with that familiar look of sarcasm, shrugging beside you as she swung the backpack from her arm and onto a dresser. Her arm reached into it, rummaging as you leant against the wood.

“Your manager sleeps in his own store?” She huffed a laugh at your quirked brow.

“He’s kind of.. down and out, it’s the only place he has right now.”

“Then where is he?”

“I’m not sure, out of town for something he’s gone crazy about, something he’s found apparently.”

She eventually pulled out a packet of ‘jiffy pop’ from the bag with a proud smile, “Right Im gonna get us actual food.”

Kat turned on her heel, placing a hand on your shoulder before giving it a squeeze.

“Don’t get into too much trouble.. and.. don’t let Bobby touch anything.”

Kat disappeared down the hall in search of the break room, leaving you standing in the middle of Clark's furniture store trying not to laugh at how ridiculous this was.

You had been lying in their apartment for hours before one of you, not that you could hardly remember, mentioned heading out. And after however long of wandering through town, the last glimpses of the sunset burning into the dark, you’d made it to Clark’s.

"Yeah if we don’t get arrested for a break in."

Bobby had already claimed an entire display bedroom for himself, setting it up for you all. The bed was wide, king sized it read from the poster, with deep blue sheets and off white pillows, discoloured it looked from that angle.

"Nah," he said, kicking off his shoes and throwing himself backwards onto the mattress. "This is basically a hotel."

"It’s a furniture store." You crossed your arms watching him with a squint.

"Exactly, free hotel."

The mattress bounced as he spread his arms dramatically with a smirk. Half of the lights had been switched off for the night, leaving the showroom glowing in soft amber pools, and somehow it actually made it look homely. Not the empty, stale place the three of you usually made fun of.

Your eyes wandered over the space, fighting a smile. The whole place felt surreal. Couches were arranged like fake living rooms, lamps casting warm circles of light, rows of untouched beds stretching into darkness, and the staircase behind you leading to the lower level. Not creepy at all.

You found yourself drifting where Kat had disappeared to. The three of you had been inseparable all evening, and lately it had only grown, like some undergrown strange tension that crept on you all slowly. Being friends for years would do that you supposed, but it always seemed as if there was more. Like gravity pulled you together just as you all had stayed close. The lingering glances, the casual touches that lasted a little too long, and some sort of feeling nobody seemed quite ready to put into words.

They’d been dating for two years, and you’d been happy for them, even remembered the exact day they’d came come from school in the late afternoon to your house just to tell you.

“So you’re together, together?” You leaned on the doorframe, eyes wide with excitement.

“Hell yeah.” Bobby’s arm slung around Kat’s shoulders with a proud grin.

“Not that this changes anything, he’s still an idiot, and you’re still my favourite.” Kat smirked at you.

“Hey—“ Kat swatted him in the stomach before grabbing onto you and ushering you outside into whatever left of the summer sun there was.

And she was right, it didn’t change anything at all. If anything it brought you all closer. There wasn’t anything unspoken, it was all out in the open and comfortable, except for one thing. How they had felt for you.

Bobby patted the spot beside him.

"Come test the merchandise." He spoke up, gesturing his head toward his hand.

"You sound like a salesman."

"I'm the best salesman Clark's ever had."

The thought made you laugh, yeah right.

You stepped forward anyway, the bed dipping beneath your weight as you kicked off your shoes and climbed on. Neither of you said anything at first, just laying a single arm length’s away as you realised he was right.

The mattress was hard, sticking into your back through the plump covers. Though it should have been expected, it’s a display. So much for getting high beforehand, you hadn’t through that far. So you made do with what you could, snagging the fur blanket from the end of the bed and tucking it behind you both.

The flicker of the TV box he’d angled into a chest of drawers, lit up your faces through the shadowed space, returns of old tv shows muffled in the background. And both of you were engrossed, staring into the flashing colours fading in and out.

You felt eyes on you after a while, staring into you from the side. Bobby had turned his head slightly, blue eyes burning into you, and you turned yours.

His grin had disappeared somewhere along the way, leaving only the twinkle in gaze, something you’d always noticed reserved for one other person. The one they reserved for eachother.

"You're staring." Bobby whispered dropping his head between you both teasingly.

"No I'm not." You kicked his leg lightly, shaking the buzz from your head, but it didn’t seem to lift, instead it grew, a shiver wracking the back of you spine.

"You are.”

"You started it.” The wood of the headboard creaked behind you as you braced your knees up, tucking them toward your chest.

That earned a laugh, a breathy one like the air had been punched from his lungs as he sat up, and then suddenly you were both laughing. The kind of laughter that came from being slightly high, and running entirely on bad decisions.

Bobby's shoulder brushed yours then, quick and tender, so quick it could have been ignored, but you were already heightened, alert to every movement around you. Neither of you moved away, his eyes flicking down briefly before returning to yours.

"Hey." He rasped softly, lips parted as he turned to rest onto his arm.

"Hey." You whispered back, swallowing thickly.

“Bobby I don’t think..”

You weren’t able to continue, to telll him it was a bad idea, that it was wrong, but before either of you could overthink it, he leaned in.

The kiss was soft. Tentative and warm, his lips brushing over yours with a desperate tenderness, and you almost melted into it, almost.

You jumped apart from him when you heard footsteps, catching the gaze of your best friend in your peripheral. Bobby only retracted, still ghosting your lips as he released the palm he’d placed on your cheek.

Kat appeared around the corner, standing beside the TV stand, carrying the popcorn in a bowl she’d somehow found. Her eyes darted to Bobby, then at you and then back to Bobby, a hand moving to her hip, and for a moment none of you said anything.

"...Seriously?"

“Kat I can—“ Your face burned.

Bobby immediately pointed at you, “Her fault.”

"My fault?" You whipped your head toward him.

"Absolutely." His face was unreadable, even if the smirk that pulled at his lips was far from innocent.

Kat stared for another second before letting out a laugh so hard the bowl of popcorn ruffled in her hands.

"You two are unbelievable. You couldn’t have waited for me?”

She tossed the bowl softly onto the bed and climbed onto the mattress beside you. You only stared at her, at both of them, eyes wandering where your heart hammered in your chest in a way you didn’t know how to feel. Shame? Guilt?

“Really I didn’t think—“ The words left your mouth before you could hardly speak, stumbling over them to explain.

“You have no idea how long we’ve waited to do that.” Kat cut you off gently, settling herself comfortable under the blanket.

Desire—

“You— uh, what?” Your head snapped up, and she just nodded, popping a piece of popcorn into her mouth with a smirk, handing the bowl over to you.

We. The word lingered in your head, stirring your senses as if you’d been dreaming. But they only smiled at you, amused by the dumbfounded look on your face, as if all of it, their own agreement of you, had been common knowledge.

The three of you collapsed into a tangled pile of blankets and laughter, yours somewhat in disbelief. But even as the three of you rested back, Kat bumped her shoulder against yours.

"Move over."

You rolled your eyes and listened, shuffling over into the very middle of the bed, both of their leg’s sticking into yours from the sides. “Bossy."

"Always."

Bobby groaned dramatically as Kat stole half of the blanket, and with the minutes passing and him still busy complaining about the blanket theft, Kat glanced over at you and the playful expression on her face softened.

"Come here," she said quietly, beckoning you over with the pull of her fingers. And before you could ask what she meant, not that you bothered to question, she leaned in and pressed a gentle kiss to your lips.

She looked just as surprised as you felt when she pulled back, her hand splaying at your hip. Bobby blinked from behind you, grinning softly, leaning around you both where you could both see him.

"Oh, so we're all doing that now?"

Kat reached at her side and threw the pillow behind her back at him. The three of you dissolved into laughter again, and that time nobody seemed interested in pretending that nothing had happened.

Because there was something different underneath it all. Something shared between all three of you finally coming undone.

You shook your head, resting back into one another and staring mindlessly at the static buzzing from the television. The three of you must have passed another two blunts between you when the haze grew, thick and heady. The room contorting amongst you all into something more heated, as if the air had been sucked from the space entirely. A leg slid up against yours, and fingertips touched at your thigh.

Kat steadied her hand there as your breath stuttered, the cool air of Bobby’s exhale sifting right at the back of your neck. Your noses bumped then, rocking back and forth as your breaths mingled, lips ghosting through lidded eyes and exhilaration.

“Hey, you know we haven’t got to do anything you don’t want to.” She was breathless, brown eyes gazing into yours with careful consideration that washed all over your face.

“You want this?” You tilted to look at both of them, Bobby and Kat looked at each other over either side of you and meeting back to you, their hands curled around one another’s, “Uh.. yeah, more than anything..”

You nodded slowly, the breath catching in your throat, “Then I want to.” Your hand curled around Kat’s neck as she dipped back to kiss you, this time hungrier, her tongue sweeping across your lip, and inching you both back against the headboard.

“You’re so so pretty..” She mumbled into your lips with skin pressed against skin your tongues locking around each others and another pair of lips at your neck.

“Open up for me Angel..” Bobby called out to you, arm bending over your waist and snaking the t-shirt from on you. You retracted only for a moment, the material being pulled away and tossed over on the floor, revealing the swell of your breasts. Long, warm fingers tweaked your nipple before his body had bent over you, sucking one into his mouth. His tongue was hot against your the sensitive bud, swirling harshly until you moaned into Kat’s mouth.

One hand fell into his hair, threading through the fine blonde strands as you arched into the feeling, his hand staying gripped at your hip to keep you in place.

His own t-shirt rose over his head with one steady tug, reaching for your hand to put it against his skin, letting you feel him. You traced the warm planes of muscle, down his chest and to his abs, and further along the v of that dipped beneath his jean shorts. Bobby shuddered against you, pressing into your thigh, and trailing his fingers down your sides.

You watched them through the haze, a gentle buzzing in your fingertips and your chest. The high from the pot or them you couldn’t tell, and not that it mattered.

They pulled away only for a moment, impatient and needily, Kat’s arms rising on instinct as he helped her take the rest of her clothes off, sliding her shorts down the legs before her fingers worked at undoing his belt buckle, reaching to cup the bulge beneath his pants, already tented and aching. “Save it.. for next time baby.” She mumbled against his lips over you, and he groaned into the kiss with a slight nod.

Next time.

He shrugged the rest of his clothes off, leaving him only in his underwear, the hard line of his cock poking through the dark fabric. She rose beside him, the curve of her breasts shadowed beautifully in the golden light, and the tan flesh of her thighs curling over yours. The pressure swirled in your belly at the sight, arousal coating slick between your thighs.

Bobby settled behind you, an arm slipping around your waist as though he’d always belonged there, and the warmth of him at your back only made Kat’s presence in front feel more overwhelming. You shivered at the feeling, hands moving between the both of them as they settled.

Kat’s fingers brushed loose hair from your face before cupping your cheek, foreheads touching briefly, sharing a knowing smile that felt private despite the crowded tangle of limbs and blankets.

“There you are,” Kat murmured softly.

The attention from both sides left you breathless, almost unable to move if you couldn’t feel the thump of heartbeats and burning touch of skin.

Bobby’s chin stayed pressed to your shoulder, his hands sliding lower, gripping your hips to keep you pinned between them. Kat’s mouth claimed yours again, her tongue sliding deep while her fingers pinched your nipple hard enough to make your back arch. Bobby’s cock dragged along the cleft of your ass, thick and hot, already leaking as he rocked forward in slow, deliberate thrusts that never quite pushed inside.

"Fuck, you’re soaked," he muttered against your neck, teeth scraping over the fresh mark he’d just sucked there. His tongue followed, licking the sting away before he dropped lower, body snaking further down the bed, spreading your thighs wider with his shoulders. The cool air hit your pussy, as he turned you onto your back, both pairs of eyes flicking between you he gave one long, filthy lick from your entrance to your clit, making your whole body jerk back against the ruffled sheets. He groaned into your cunt like he was starving, sucking your swollen clit between his lips and flicking it with the tip of his tongue, teasing two thick fingers through your folds.

Kat swallowed your broken moan, grinding her soaked pussy against your thigh. She grabbed your wrist and moved your hand between her legs. "Please.." Your fingers slid through her slick folds, her legs widening as two of them sunk knuckle-deep into her tight heat while your thumb rubbed tight circles over her clit. She rode your hand with short, desperate rolls of her hips, her juices coating your palm as she panted into your mouth.

Bobby pulled his fingers out and replaced them with his tongue, fucking you with it in messy, wet strokes before he sucked your clit again, loud and obscene. Spit and your arousal dripped down his chin, his one hand keeping you spread open while the other stroked his cock in time with every thrust of his tongue.

"Taste so fucking good," he groaned, voice muffled against your pussy. Kat fluttered around your fingers as she came with a sharp cry, her thighs shaking and wetness gushing over your hand. She didn’t stop moving, she only kissed you harder, biting your lower lip while her fingers found your other breast and squeezed it into her hand.

Bobby clamped at your thighs, tugging you further down onto his mouth as you mewled, bucking your hips against his face while your fingers pumped in and out of Kat’s wetness, drawing all of you closer to your edge. He rubbed himself into the sheets, fucking himself through the rough fabric of his pants and into his palm desperately.

Moans filled the room of the empty store, so confined and warm, that all care for even being there had left your mind, filled with the haze of them fucking you. You felt the peak of your climax, falling over the edge with the burn of Kat’s whines into your neck and Bobby’s tongue.

“Fuck, make her come Bobby..”

Kat straddled your chest, knees planted on either side of your head, lowering herself onto your waiting mouth, grinding down with a breathy moan as your tongue pushed inside her. Your tongue and sucked at her swollen clit while she rocked against your face her brow pulled tight as she gripped the headboard. Her juices coated your chin and cheeks, as she rode you harder, Bobby’s face still buried between your spread thighs, tongue working in relentless, sloppy strokes.

He dragged the flat of it up through your soaked folds, circled your swollen clit, plunging back down to fuck into your dripping hole. Every lewd sound and moan echoed in the quiet room, his fingers digging into your ass, holding you open while he rode you through your high.

Your own climax hit fast and hard, crashing over your body in a wave and making you come with a muffled cry, your fingers tightening at Kat’s waist. Your thighs clamped around Bobby’s head as your pussy clenched and pulsed, fresh wetness flooding his tongue and he groaned into you, lapping it up greedily while his hips jerked against the mattress. The friction against his trapped cock was too much, “Fuck fuck fuck..” He came with a broken grunt after a few sloppy thrusts, hot cum soaking through his pants in thick spurts, his whole body shuddering between your legs.

Kat followed seconds later, her hips stuttering over your tongue as she came, grinding down hard, her thighs shaking on either side of your head. She cried out into her hand, gushing over your lips and chin, riding out every wave until she finally went limp. The golden strands of his hair fell into his eyes, his forehead rocked into your inner thigh as he finally let up, panting to catch his breath.

Her body fell down beside you, climbing from you carefully where the three of you collapsed together in the tangled sheets, a hazy sheen coating your bodies.

Kat slid to curl against your side, her face tucked into your neck, still breathing hard. Bobby crawled up behind you, pressing his sticky, cum-wet front to your back and wrapping an arm around both of you. His breath warmed your shoulder as he nuzzled closer. Kat’s fingers traced lazy circles on your stomach while Bobby’s hand rested heavy on your hip. No one spoke. Just the sound of slowing breaths and the quiet creak of the bed as you all melted into one another, warm and spent.

The three of you lay there, tucked and blissed out in a bed you shouldn’t have been in, veiled moonlight peeking through the thin shutters in the small glow of the showroom. Every buzz of the high eased off into a comfortable tiredness, as your breathing evened out.

“I think I need new shorts.” Bobby mumbled into your back, and you let out a short giggle hearing the smack against muscle from Kat’s hand reaching over. But none of you bothered to move, his shoulders shrugging, and the pair of them cuddling around you as his arm swung over you both.

So much for bad decisions. But secretly, none you hoped it would end. After all, it was just the beginning of something none of you were ready for.