♡.⋆˚. ݁𓃹 ݁.˚⋆.♡

“you don’t want that,” he says. quiet. bobby’s voice but with something underneath it. older and less certain.

“i do.”

“you want this.” he gestures at his face. bobby’s face. the cheekbones, the jaw, the blue eyes. the product. the carefully maintained performance. “this is what you want. this is what you like.”

and there it is. right there. the wound he’s been carrying since before you met him. since before he chose bobby’s face. the fundamental question of his existence: am i loveable or is the mask loveable? if i take it off does anything underneath deserve to be looked at? or am i just. the dark. the cold. the nothing that was here before the walls.

“baby,” you say, and the word does what it always does, tugs at something structural in him, pulls his attention back to you. “i’m not asking to see bobby. i’m asking to see you.”

and he’s quiet for a long time.

this wouldn’t happen quickly. this isn’t a single conversation. this is weeks. maybe longer. you bringing it up gently. him deflecting. you not pushing. him thinking about it in the dark when you’re asleep, turning the idea over in the dim. examining it from every angle. running calculations about risk and reward and the specific probability that you will look at what’s underneath and leave.

because that’s the fear. not that you’ll be afraid. he could handle afraid. afraid is a human response, afraid means you saw something, afraid can be worked through.

the fear is that you’ll be repulsed. that you’ll look at the thing under the bobby suit and your face will do the thing (the shutting-down thing, the pulling-away one, the thing bobby’s face used to do when he checked out) and bb will know, finally, definitively, that the face was the whole reason. that without it he is nothing you want.

but you keep asking. gently. patiently. with the same quiet persistence that taught him “baby” and “mine” and “good boy.” you don’t push. you just leave the door open.

and one night in the nest (because it would be the nest, it would have to be the nest, the safest place in the backrooms, the place he built for you, the place where every blanket and every adjusted light and every degree of temperature is a love letter) he says okay.

“okay.” barely a whisper. “but—not all at once. slowly.”

“slowly,” you agree.

and he starts.

the blue goes first. drains out of his eyes the way it does when he’s relaxed, but this time he lets it go all the way. doesn’t catch it. doesn’t pull it back. the black fills in completely and he watches you watching him and you don’t flinch. you’ve seen the black before. the black is familiar. the black is almost home by now.

then the face. the geometry shifts. cheekbones pressing higher, sharper, past the point where he usually catches them and reshapes them back to bobby’s template. the jaw sharpening. the brow ridge becoming more pronounced. the features sliding from “bobby franklin” toward something that was never meant to be human. something older. more angular. more alien.

he’s shaking. you can feel it. fine tremors running through his whole body, the entity equivalent of standing naked in front of someone for the first time. every instinct he has is screaming at him to pull the mask back on. to be bobby. to be safe. to be the thing he knows you love instead of the thing he’s afraid you won’t.

you take his face in your hands.

his real face. or closer to it. the face underneath the face. sharp and strange and cold under your palms and so different from bobby and so completely, unmistakably him.

and whatever you see (whatever the full scope of it is, the true form, the thing that was here before the carpet and the walls and the hum) we’re not going to describe it fully. because some things are private. some things belong only to the nest and the dark and the two people in it. what matters isn’t what he looks like.

what matters is what you say.

and what you say, with his real face in your hands and his black eyes searching yours for the flinch that doesn’t come, is:

“pretty thing.”

the sound he makes doesn’t have a descriptor in any language.

but the lights in the nest go luminous. and the air goes almost sweet. and the hum drops to that low, steady frequency that means home.