Cheyene

                        You're here again.

        Good.

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

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

There isn't.

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

                                                S̷̬̈t̵̰̾a̸̝͂y̷̖̓ ̶̣̈́a̴̹͌ ̵̙̀w̷̭̉h̸̘͝ǐ̷͇ḷ̶̾ḙ̸͂.̷̰̊

Let me tell you how it started.

I have been here since the hum.

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

I am old.

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

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

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

This is my territory. Every mildewed inch.

I know humans.

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

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

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

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

I have watched thousands of you.

I did not want to know any of you.

Until her.

         Until you.

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

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

I know because I breathe through it.

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

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

Then yours.

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

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

"They're in your truck right now."

"Those are different cushions."

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

"Circumstantial, baby"

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

Stopped.

I don't know why you.

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

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

But yours.

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

Underneath.

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

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

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

Oh.

You. Of course it was going to be you.

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

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

In the beginning, he came every shift.

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

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

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

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

I loved it.

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

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

And then there were the nights you were together.

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

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

I heard everything.

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

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

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

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

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

But this was different.

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

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

                 Was.

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

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

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

I didn't have a body yet.

But that’s when I started building one.

And then he stopped coming.

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

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

Then the visits got less frequent.

Then they stopped altogether.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I did.

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

I know anger the way I know the hum.

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

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

But it was rage.

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

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

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

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

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

Then one night you were quiet.

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

And then your voice hitched.

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

You cried.

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

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

You couldn't stop.

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

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

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

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

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

So I did.

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

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

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

"Baby."

You stopped humming.

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

"... Bobby?"

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

"Down here, baby. Come here."

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

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

And then you came through.

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

I want to tell you that.

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

I did not hesitate. Not for one second.

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

You deserved better.

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

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

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

I know.

I don't regret it.

Not for one flickering second.

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

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

A better Bobby.

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

I put my arms around you.

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

It lasted three days.

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

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

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

"You're not Bobby."

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

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

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

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

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

"What are you?"

"Something that lives here."

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

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

You stared at me.

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

"Better," you repeated. Hollow.

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

You were quiet for a long, long time.

You didn't run.

Taking care.

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

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

I found you food.

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

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

The way you might find a colony of ants adorable.

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

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

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

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

You talk to yourself. Still. Even here.

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

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

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

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

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

You organise things. Everything. You organise the nest.

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

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

I felt—

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

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

I held that word in my chest for three days.

You taught me to dance.

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

But I had never participated.

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

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

"I don't—I've never—"

"I know."

"I'll do it wrong."

"That's the fun part."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neither of us knew I could.

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

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

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

I—

You are a thousand things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have never felt the sun.

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

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

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

Because you feel like that to me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will never have to lose you.

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

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

You are different from other wanderers for that reason.

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

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

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

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

You were not a splinter.

You were invited.

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

Do you understand what that means?

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

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

The bright world is forgetting you.

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

The tapes are going blank.

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

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

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

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

I understand why.

I don't tell him.

I don't tell you, either.

I r e s e n t him.

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

I resent Bobby Franklin.

Not because he had you.

Because he had you and he           

w             

a               

   s                   

  t                    

      e              

                d

it.

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

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

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

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

Bobby Franklin     

Bobby Franklin         

Bobby Franklin             

Bobby Franklin                 

Bobby Franklin

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

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

He is real. He has a history.

I have a territory.

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

I know you still love him.

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

Bobby Franklin, who never blushed.

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

And I thought: is that not enough?

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

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

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

He comes to the wall. I hear him.

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

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

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

I don't tell you he's there.

                I                        don't                               tell                                         you.

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

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

His loneliness is months old.

Mine is older than the concept of months.

Mine came first.

The Howler.

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

But the Howler is different.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Run."

You run.

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

And then I feel your fear.

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

It's below.

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

Level 2.

And the Smiler found you.

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

        tear

                through.

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

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

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

You close them. Your eyelashes against my palm.

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

I let the face go completely.

      .

                  .

                              .

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

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

"You can open them."

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

And you break.

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

"How did you get away?" you whisper.

I smile. Bobby's lazy half-grin.

"Don't worry about it, baby."

Entity X.

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

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

I call it something else.

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

Concerning.

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

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

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

So I agree.

And the notebook fills.

Then the men come.

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

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

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

                        "BB—"

And the walls move.

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

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

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

I arrive.

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

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

And I see you.

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

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

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

                s̷̬̈n̵̰̾a̸̝͂r̷̖̓ḷ̶̈́ǐ̷͇ǹ̵̙g̷̭̉.̸̘͝

It takes less than a minute.

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

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

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

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

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

And I soften. Again, helplessly.

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

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

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

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

"Never," I say.

One word. A law.

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

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

And you let me.

I build it while you sleep.

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

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

I build it from your memory.

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

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

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

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

Just us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You wake up a while later.

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

"BB."

"Yeah?"

"This is my apartment."

"Yeah."

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

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

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

Just a smile.

Just for me.

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

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

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

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

To me...

To me.

To me you are everything.

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

And I can feel it.

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

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

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

I pull you close. And I sigh.

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

Happiness.

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

Not Better Bobby anymore.

BB.

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

My own being. My own—

                                (yours.)

  (I love you.)

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

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

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

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

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

        I wish I could tell you that.

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

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

        The door I kept closed.

        The one in Clark’s basement.

        The one that breathes.

        It opened again.

        And this was the beginning of the end.

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

                                 ... you’re still here?

                                               Please.

                                                  Please don't leave, please, please stay.

mr kitty. in the back. who’s been silent the entire time this discourse has been rippling through the backrooms entity grapevine. mr kitty who made you cookies and gave you tea and watched bb have a jealousy meltdown over a baked good. mr kitty who understands more than he lets on, who has been quietly existing in his warm little pocket of level 974 minding his business this entire time.

the discourse reaches mr kitty. some entity or another passes along the general gist: bb has taken a human companion, bb is sleeping with the human companion, bb has fundamentally restructured his entire existence around a girl he lured in with a stolen face, opinions?

mr kitty, who has no face and therefore cannot technically smirk, radiates the energy of a smirk.

“would.”

one word. (or the entity equivalent of one word—mr kitty doesn’t technically speak but his communication is unmistakable.) delivered with the calm energy of someone who’s been waiting for exactly this moment. not because he means it. not because mr kitty has any interest in humans in that way. purely (PURELY) because he knows it’ll get back to bb. everything gets back to bb eventually. the backrooms are a small town when you’re an entity despite their infinite nature and bb is the mayor and mr kitty essentially just put a sign on the community noticeboard that says “your girlfriend’s cute” for the sole purpose of watching the mayor burst a vessel.

and it DOES get back to bb. of course it does. and you’re walking through level 0 one day and bb is beside you and he’s doing the jaw thing. the tightening. the one that means something is bothering him that he doesn’t want to talk about.

“you okay?”

“fine.”

“you’re doing the jaw thing.”

“there’s no jaw thing.”

“bb.”

“…we’re not going back to level 974.”

and you don’t find out why for WEEKS and when you finally piece it together (through context clues and bb’s increasingly territorial behaviour every time you mention wanting cookies) you laugh so hard your face hurts and bb stands there doing the most dignified version of a sulk that an ancient eldritch entity has ever produced.

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

but then you start being unhappy.

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

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

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

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

bb starts showing sharper edges.

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

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

they fight.

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

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

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

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

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

and the air changes.

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

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

who is raising his voice now.

about you.

oh.

OH.

the realisation is a physical thing.

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

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

not a question.

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

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

relief.

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

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

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

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

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

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

same face. same choice.

he goes down without resistance. he always does for you. he lets you tip him backward onto the blankets—the fabric sighing under his weight, the nest reshaping itself around him—lets you settle him onto his back like he's furniture you're rearranging. his eyes are wide and curious, a little startled because you don't usually move him.

you climb on top of him.

you don't look at his face. you can't. the lights are too bright and your skin is too tight and you can't articulate a single human thought right now. you just push your hands up under the bottom of his hoodie, under his shirt, shoving the fabric up around his ribs. your knuckles drag across his stomach, the skin smooth and cool like river stone, and then you duck your head and crawl under the hem.

it's dark under there.

it's quiet under there.

bb's stomach is cool against your cheek. the cotton of his hoodie is a small dim tent over your head, soft against the back of your neck, and the harsh lights are gone. completely gone. blocked out by the fabric, and you exhale for the first time all day.

your whole body unclenches. you press your face against the smooth wrong-temperature skin of his torso and listen to the absence of his heartbeat and feel the low hum vibrating through his sternum, through his ribs. press closer to the cool, flat plane of his stomach where your cheek rests.

you can smell him. damp cotton, and underneath that, mineral and ancient scent. like stone that's been underground for a very long time. it should be unsettling. yet somehow it's the most comforting thing in the world.

you close your eyes.

shh.

bb has gone completely, utterly still.

you remember, vaguely, somewhere in the back of your tired exhausted brain real bobby. before everything went wrong.

lying in bed with him on a sunday afternoon, the light coming through his bedroom window warm and golden, and joking i want to be so close to you i'm basically in your ribcage and bobby laughing and saying babe that's weird and pulling you into his arms, burying his face in your hair.

he'd held you like that for a while. you could hear his heartbeat, real and steady and human, and his skin was warm. he smelled like skin, cheap soap and even cheaper cologne he'd worn since sophomore year, and you'd thought this. this is all i need.

he would have let you stay there. he did let you stay there. he was really good once. he just couldn't sustain it. the arms would loosen. the attention would drift. he'd reach for his pager with one hand while the other went slack against your back and you'd feel the moment he left even though his body was still there.

bb is not leaving.

his hands are hovering somewhere above you. you can feel the space where they should be, the cool absence of contact, the careful displacement of air. and you can sense him not knowing what to do. processing. trying to figure out the protocol for the love of his existence has just burrowed under his clothes and pressed her face against his stomach and is making a small, contented noises.

then, slowly, gently, his hands settle.

palm flat against your back through the layers of his hoodie. the weight of his hand steady and deliberate, fingers spread wide, covering as much of you as he can reach. the other curls around the back of your head, holding you to him, fingers threading at the nape of your neck where the tension lives.

the humming starts.

not in his throat. in his chest. you feel it everywhere your skin touches his. that low constant vibration, the resonance that means safe, mine, stay. and it's so much closer like this, so much louder. you're inside it now. you've crawled into the source. it moves through bb's ribs and into your cheekbone and down through your jaw, settling in your chest.

your breathing syncs to it without your permission. your body trusting him before your brain can object.

he understands. he doesn't say anything but he understands.

somewhere in his unknowable processing he's connecting this to every joke you've ever made, every offhand comment about wanting to be closer. every small, impossible wish you've voiced to other people who couldn't give it to you. he's filing this moment in whatever he has instead of memory and labelling it she chose me. she crawled into me. she came home.

bb's hand strokes unhurriedly down your back through the hoodie. up. down. his fingers find the knots along your spine and press (not hard, just enough, just exactly enough) and the tension you've been carrying between your shoulder blades releases in a way that makes your breath stutter.

you press closer. your arm curls around his side, fingers finding the ridge of his lower ribs. too prominent, the set up slightly wrong, the bones just a fraction too defined under the skin, and you hold on.

the hum deepens.

you fall asleep there.

in the dark. against his bare skin. under his clothes. inside the warm cotton tent that smells like cold stone and uniquely him.

the lights stop bothering you because you can't see them anymore. the migraine ebbs. your breathing slows and matches the rhythm of his impossible non-breath. you can feel his chest rise and fall—performing it, mirroring your rhythm, breathing because you're breathing, syncing himself to you the way he syncs everything to you.

bb doesn't move for the rest of the day.

he could. he doesn't.

he stays exactly where he is. one hand on your back. one in your hair. humming his tuneless song into the dark space where you've made yourself small against him. and somewhere in level 0, the fluorescent lights dim by a degree, then another, then another. soft, dim, gentle. because his girl is sleeping and the harshness was hurting her and he's the walls, the carpet, the lights and he'll simply make them stop.

rib time.

shh.

His voice is soft. Bobby's voice is never careful, not even this version, but soft, like someone asking a question they're not sure they want the answer to.

You don't answer that. Instead, you say, “Are you going to hurt me?”

He blinks.

“The way you hurt that thing.” Your voice is steadier than you expected. Flat, almost. The flatness of a person who’s run out of room for new fear and is now operating from somewhere clinical. Survival-practical. “Whatever it was. The sounds it made. The sounds you made.”

There’s movement behind his eyes. He doesn’t flinch, but you spot a shift, a recalibration, like a camera adjusting focus. He remembers what you heard. That low rumbling from his chest that didn't belong in any throat shaped like a human's.

“No,” he says. Immediate. No hesitation, no pause to consider. The word comes out of him with absolute certainty, like a reflex. “No. Never.”

You watch him closely. He looks back at you. The fluorescent light buzzes overhead, casting that flat, shadowless yellow across everything. Better Bobby's face is open and sincere, but you don't believe him. Not completely. Not after what you heard through your closed eyelids. The shrieking and the wet dragging sound and the silence after, the horrible, total silence. The way he'd come back to you without a drop of anything on him. Like unmaking something in the dark was a minor errand.

And not after Bobby. Not after learning what it looks like when someone says I would never and means it and does it anyway. With the slow, grinding, erosive negligence of a man who might have loved you once but still started disappearing while standing right next to you. 

Bobby never hit you. Never raised his voice in a way that carried a threat. Not once. Bobby simply stopped. Stopped seeing you, stopped hearing you, stopped reaching for you in the morning, and the absence was its own kind of violence, bloodless and total.

Now you're in a yellow hallway with a thing wearing his face telling you never with the same mouth and you cannot—you cannot—take that word at face value. Not from that face. Not anymore.

And he sees it. The disbelief. He reads it on your face the way real Bobby used to read light through a viewfinder. With instinctive precision, without needing to be told what he's seeing.

Better Bobby reaches out. Tips your chin up with one knuckle. Gentle. So gentle. Guiding your face back to his when you'd started to drift, to look away, to find a spot on the yellow wall that was easier to stare at than his eyes.

“Why do you think I chose this face?”

He says this face with an edge to his voice. Not quite contempt, not quite amusement. But snide. A little sharp. The closest thing to edge you've ever heard from Better Bobby. This brief flash of awareness that the face he's wearing belongs to someone else. Someone who wasted it, and he knows it, and he wears it anyway because—

You're silent.

Better Bobby smiles. Gentle. The sharpness folds back into warmth the way a blade folds back into a handle.

“I heard you,” he says quietly.

Your breath catches.

“From the other side. Through the wall.” He says it simply, his thumb working carefully over the dip of your chin. “He used to come to the store. Bobby. In the beginning. Before you worked the night shifts alone. He'd come hang out, and you'd be downstairs together, and I could hear you. Both of you. I could hear what it sounded like when he was still—” He pauses, expression twisting. You see him choose and settle on his next words. “When he was still trying.”

The lights flicker. Once. Settle again.

“And then he stopped coming. And you were alone down there. And I could hear that too.”

Your chest goes tight.

“You used to talk,” Better Bobby goes gently, watching your face. “Not to anyone. Not on the phone. Just—out loud. To the room. To yourself. To him, even though he wasn't there. Do you remember?” His thumb traces your jawline, feather-light. “You'd say things like he doesn't listen anymore. And he didn't kiss me goodbye again today, that's the third day in a row, am I keeping count now? Is that what I'm doing? Keeping count?”

Your eyes burn, blurring his familiar features. 

“And I don't think he sees me. I'm standing right in front of him, and he's looking through me like I'm furniture. Like I'm one of Clark's display pieces. Something you walk around.”

“Stop,” you whisper.

He doesn't stop, but his voice goes softer. Almost tender.

“You were so lonely.” He says it like it's the saddest thing he's ever learned, and maybe it is. Maybe loneliness sounds different from the other side of a wall. Rawer, louder, the way a voice sounds in an empty room because there's nothing else to absorb it. “And so sad. And so angry, baby—”

You flinch because you don't—you weren't angry. You were hurt. That's a smaller, quieter, more acceptable thing than anger.

Because anger would mean admitting that what Bobby did wasn't just a failure of attention but a choice. Night after night after night, a man choosing the path of least resistance over the person lying next to him, and if you let yourself be angry about that, then the whole careful belief of maybe it's me, maybe I'm asking for too much, maybe love is supposed to feel like this after a while collapses, and what's underneath it is—

“—you were so angry, and you didn't even let yourself feel it. You said it like it was your fault. Like if you could just be more interesting or prettier or less needy, he'd—”

Hot, liquid feeling surges up from your chest to your throat. “Stop.”

He stops. But his eyes don't leave yours, and in them you can see that he knows. He heard it all, you realise. Every whispered self-indictment, every quiet renegotiation of your own worth to accommodate Bobby's shrinking attention.

He heard the thing underneath it too, the thing you buried so deep you forgot it was there. 

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

You buried it because anger felt like giving up. Because if you were angry, it meant something was wrong, and if something was wrong, it could be over. If it was over, then you'd given your whole heart to someone who let it sit on a shelf and gather dust, and that was unbearable. So you turned the anger inward instead, folded it into self-doubt, and let it eat you rather than the situation, because at least that way the situation could still be saved.

Better Bobby heard you bury it. He heard the burial, and he heard the body underneath it, and he's looking at you now with something that isn't pity or judgment. Isn't the performative concern that Bobby used to deploy in those final months when he bothered to notice you were hurting at all. That tight-jawed what's wrong that really meant please don't make me deal with this. 

This is something else. Recognition. The look of a thing that knows what it sounds like when someone swallows their own rage until it poisons them. Until it makes them abandon everything they once knew for a world of yellow, buzzing lights and monsters in the dark. 

“It wasn't you,” he says, his hand cupping your cheek. His palm is cool, his fingers curving, and he holds you there. There’s no force, no hard grip, he’s just holding. Cradling. The way you'd hold something you found in the dark that was shaking. “It was never you. You could've been perfect. You were perfect. And he still would've pulled away because that's what he does. That's how he's built. He gets close, and it scares him. So he retreats, and that's his malfunction, not yours.”

It’s then you start crying.

Not like earlier. After the attack. That was shock, adrenaline, your nervous system shorting out. 

This is different. This is slow and terrible, coming from somewhere so deep you didn't know the room existed. 

It's the crying you should've done months ago, in the apartment in Santa Clara, on the nights when Bobby was asleep three feet away, and you were staring at the ceiling, wondering when you became the kind of woman who measures love in absences. He didn't kiss me today. He didn't ask about my day. He didn't look up. Keeping count. Tallying the deficit. The anger you didn't let yourself feel and the grief you couldn't afford mixed with the loneliness you absorbed like radiation, quietly, invisibly, until it changed the composition of your bones.

Better Bobby pulls you in when the first sob breaks. Slow and careful, his arms folding around you, and your face presses into his chest.

He holds you while you shake apart. His hand moves on your back, but there's more uncertainty in it now. He pauses at your shoulder blade. Adjusts. Resettles his palm. Like he's figuring out the right pressure in real time. Learning the weight of comfort.

His chin rests on top of your head, and you can feel the slight furrow of his brow against your hair, the way his body is holding very still around the motion of his hand. He’s noting each shudder, each ragged breath, trying to understand the mechanics of this. What crying is. What it means. Why your body does it and what it needs from his.

“I love him,” you choke out. Waterlogged. Muffled against his chest. “I love him so much. And he just—he stopped. He just stopped, and I keep thinking if I'd done something different, if I'd been—”

“No.” Firm the way a hand on your shoulder is firm when you're about to step into traffic. “Don't do that.”

“—if I'd been less”—”

“No.”

His arms tighten around you. You feel his jaw clench against the top of your head, a brief flash of what might be anger.

At the sentence, at the shape of the thought, the idea that you would carve yourself smaller to fit inside Bobby's shrinking attention span. His hand on your back goes still and then resumes, slower, like he's reminding himself to be gentle.

“You did nothing wrong,” he says into your hair. “You loved someone. You loved them well. And they couldn't hold it. That's not a flaw in the love. That's a flaw in the hands.”

You cry until there's nothing left. Until you're just breathing, wet and ragged, against his chest. The sobs eventually thin to hiccups, then to shudders, finally settling into a deep, wrung-out stillness, the exhaustion that comes after. 

Better Bobby holds you through all of it. Doesn't shift. Doesn't pull back. Doesn't ask if you're okay, which is a kindness in itself because the answer is obviously no and being asked to say it out loud would be one more weight.

When you finally pull back, your face is swollen, and your eyes are raw. Better Bobby looks at you with an expression you've never seen on Bobby's face. Open and bewildered, creased with tenderness in a way that seems to be happening to him without his permission. Like he reached for the right emotion, grabbed something bigger than he expected.

He touches your face. Thumbs the tears off your cheekbone, one side and then the other, careful, methodical. His brow furrows. Curious. The furrow of a thing encountering a phenomenon for the first time and finding it far more complex than anticipated.

“Sad,” he murmurs. Almost to himself. Almost wonderingly.

You sit together in the yellow light for a long time. The hum fills the silence.

Then you reach out and touch his face.

Your fingertips on his cheekbone. Tracing the line of his jaw. The scar from the cabinet door. The corner of his mouth where real Bobby's grin always starts, one side before the other, that lopsided asymmetry that used to make your heart stutter.

Better Bobby goes still.

Then he hums. Low in his throat. Warm. A sound that starts in his chest and travels up through all of him like a vibration through a struck bell. His eyes close. His head tips into your palm like a cat pressing into a hand, like he's been waiting for this, this specific thing, your skin on his skin, voluntary and gentle, initiated by you.

The difference matters; it matters enormously, you can tell by the way his breath changes, goes uneven, almost delicate. 

His lips part, just slightly, lashes fluttering against your thumb.

“That feels good,” he whispers huskily. And then, quieter, with a note of genuine wonder, “How odd.”

You watch him lean into your hand, and the expression on his face is unguarded in a way that makes your chest ache. Bobby's face, but not Bobby's expression. It could never be Bobby's expression, you realise suddenly, because Bobby would've turned it into a joke by now, would've kissed your palm or made a quip or done something to break the sincerity before it got too heavy. 

Your hand stills on his cheek. He opens his eyes. Looks at you.

“I need you to make me a promise,” you say.

There’s another ripple in his expression. The tilt of his head. That almost animal curiosity, the slight cock to one side that doesn't quite track as human body language. “A promise?”

“Yes.”

He studies you. Processing. “What is a promise?”

The question is genuine. Not rhetorical, not evasive. He's looking at you the way he looked at your tears. With concentration, focus, and a desire to understand. You can almost see the gap between knowing the word and understanding the weight, and he's standing at the edge of it, waiting for you to build the bridge.

“It's—it's a commitment. Something you say that you can't take back. Something you keep even when it's hard. Even when you don't want to. Even when circumstances change.” You swallow thickly. “When you make a promise, you don't break it. That's the whole point. It's the one thing that's supposed to be unbreakable.”

Better Bobby is quiet. Considering. His eyes move across your face in that precise, reading way.

“I understand,” he says carefully, solemnly. Like he's holding the concept in his hands and turning it to see all sides. “An oath. A contract between two beings that supersedes circumstance.”

You blink. “Something like that.”

He angles his face closer, attention fixed and unblinking on you. “Then ask.”

You drag your eyes over his face. Bobby's face, Bobby's eyes, Bobby's scar. The face of a man who loved you and couldn't say it and showed it by looking away until you forgot what it felt like to be seen. The face of a thing that isn't that man and chose to wear him anyway because it heard you through a wall and wanted to be the version that stayed.

“Promise me… you won't hurt me,” you say quietly. “Not the way he did.”

The words hang in the yellow air. The hum shifts. Not louder, but denser somehow, as if the walls themselves are listening, as if the promise is being registered by something larger than the two of you.

Better Bobby's expression changes. Curiosity dissolves. What replaces it is— 

You don't have a word for it. Not solemnity, a gravity older than language. It rises from the part of him that isn't Bobby: the vast and ancient thing beneath the boy’s face. The part of him that understands what you are asking is not a small thing. That the promise you want is, for a being like him, a kind of architecture. A structure that, once built, holds.

“I promise,” he says. No hesitation, no charm, no Bobby-grin to soften the weight of it. Just the words, low and clear, carrying the same absolute certainty as his no earlier. A reflex, a law carved into whatever he is at a level deeper than the face, deeper than the voice. “I will not hurt you. Not the way he did. Not any way.”

His hand covers yours on his cheek. Presses it there. Holds it.

“I don't know how to break a promise,” he tells you, quieter now. “But I think that's the point.”

You nod, unable to speak. Your hand is on his face, cool to the touch, and his hand is on your hand. You watch each other for a long time, unwilling to move first.

He breaks the stalemate first, taking your hand into his.

“Come with me,” he urges with that restrained excitement in his eyes, barely contained behind Bobby's careful coolness. Something almost boyish in its sincerity. “Somewhere that's not yellow.”

You look at his hand, using your other to wipe the tear tracks off your face. “Is it safe?”

And then it returns. 

Not the gentle Better Bobby who strokes your hair and says I've got you. The other one. It surfaces behind his eyes like a shape moving under dark water. Vast, amused, ancient. His chin dips slightly. His mouth curves.

And for a half-second, the thing looking out at you from Bobby's face is not performing warmth or mimicking tenderness. It's something that has walked these hallways since the beginning. Something that heard you through a wall and chose to want you rather than simply take you, and the distinction between those two things is the only reason you're still breathing.

“Baby,” he drawls, and his voice is Bobby's, but the tone is deeper, older. “I am what's safe here.”

It lasts a second. Less. Then he blinks and the ancient thing submerges and Better Bobby is back, warm-eyed and easy-mouthed, holding his hand out to you in the yellow light like nothing happened.

“Come on,” he says, lighter now. Normal. That crooked half-grin back. “Trust me.”

You take his hand, and he pulls you up.

He leads you through the hallways. Different route this time. Sharper turns, narrower corridors, and Better Bobby moves through them with liquid confidence, his hand secure around yours, his pace unhurried. You pass through a section where the carpet gives way to tile, and the tile gives way to something that feels like packed earth beneath your feet. 

The walls shift from yellow to grey, and you tense, your grip tightening, and he squeezes back. Once. Reassuring.

Then the hallway opens.

You stop.

It takes your brain a moment. Several moments. Because what you're looking at doesn't belong here, can't belong here, is fundamentally incompatible with everything you've experienced in this place so far, and yet here it is: sky. Actual sky. 

Not blue exactly, but deeper and richer. The colour of late afternoon, easing toward evening, a gradient of gold and amber, close to violet at the edges. And beneath it, trees. Dense, old-growth, the kind of towering canopy you'd find in the Santa Cruz Mountains, all ferns and filtered light and the rich, complex smell of living earth. A path winds through them, beaten dirt, dappled with sun. 

You can feel it on your face. Not quite the real sun of your world, but it’s not fluorescent. 

You stand in the threshold between the hallway and the forest, and you don't breathe because if you breathe or blink, it might disappear.

“Level 14,” Better Bobby announces behind you casually, tracking your reaction. “Some people call it Paradise.”

“How—”

“Doors.” He shrugs. “Everything here has doors. Entrances and exits. You just have to know where they are.”

You step forward. Grass. Real grass, or something so close you can't tell the difference, and the sensation is so overwhelmingly normal after the carpet and concrete and yellow that your eyes fill again, and you press your hand over your mouth.

Better Bobby steps up beside you. He's watching the trees with that curious expression, head slightly tilted, but underneath it, there’s satisfaction. Quiet pride. He found this, and he brought you here because you were crying on the floor, and he didn't know what else to do except find you somewhere beautiful.

You grab his hand.

Hard, sudden, fingers lacing through his, knuckles blanching. Because there are trees and you don't trust anything that looks like the real world, because the real world abandoned you.

Better Bobby looks down at your joined hands, and his lips part. That smile appears again. The new one, the one still taking shape on features designed for smirking, learning in real time how to hold something softer. Slow. Almost shy.

He doesn't comment. Doesn't tease. Just holds your hand back and starts walking.

“It's safe here,” he tells you, feeling the tension in your grip, the coiled readiness. “This level is safe. Nothing hunts here.”

“You said the yellow—Level 0 was safe.”

“Level 0 is my territory. Things occasionally wander in.” He says my territory without emphasis, but the words land heavily anyway, carrying the weight of what you saw behind his eyes a few minutes ago, the brief flash of the creature that owns these hallways. “Here—” He gestures with his free hand. The amber light moves across his skin, and he looks different in it, softer. More like Bobby at golden hour on the fire escape back home, and the resemblance hits you like a fist. “Nothing wanders. Nothing wants to wander. It's peaceful. Even the things that live here are gentle.”

You walk. He leads you deeper, and the canopy closes overhead like a ceiling, green and gold, light falling in shafts through the leaves and landing in warm patches on the path. You hear birdsong. Birdsong. You haven't heard birdsong in… you don't know how long. The sound cracks something open in your chest that you thought had scarred over.

Your grip on his hand loosens. Slightly.

The path winds along a stream. Clear water over smooth stones, the sound of it gentle. Nothing like the dripping in the pipes on Level 2. Simply water moving over rocks because gravity says so. 

The path opens into a clearing. Tall grass. A meadow ringed by trees, the canopy breaking to reveal that impossible sky, and in the centre a fallen log covered in moss, the kind of thing you'd find on a trail in Big Basin or Castle Rock. The kind of thing you and Bobby used to perch on when you went hiking in the early days and kiss until your mouths went numb.

Better Bobby guides you to the log. You sit. He sits beside you. Hands still joined.

A bird—small, brown, ordinary—lands on a branch above you and turns its head and looks at you with one bright black eye, and you stare back at it, your chin trembling. Because it's a bird, just a bird, and you'd forgotten how much of the world you were missing.

“I didn't think this place could be beautiful,” you say quietly, looking at the amber light filtering through the canopy, the way it falls on the tall grass in warm pools. “I thought it was just… yellow. And carpet. And things with teeth.”

“Most of it is,” Better Bobby replies honestly. Not sugar-coating it.”But most of anywhere is. The trap of this place, if you can consider it one, is that you’d never want to leave. How could you? When everywhere else there’s death.”

“This is different.”

“Why?”

“Because it shouldn't exist. Because this whole place is wrong. It's not supposed to be here. None of it. And somewhere inside all that wrongness, there's this—” You gesture at the meadow, the sky, the bird, the stream. “It doesn't make sense.”

Better Bobby is quiet for a moment. Watching you the way he does—full attention, total focus, the listening that feels less like politeness and more like study.

“Maybe that’s exactly why it exists,” he says. “Maybe it was built by mistake. Or maybe it exists because nothing is ever just one thing.”

You turn to look at him. He's sitting beside you in amber light with his earring catching gold instead of fluorescent. And his face is Bobby's face, but the expression on it is something Bobby hasn’t worn in a long time, if ever. Patient, present, content with simply being here without reaching for a camera, without filtering the moment through a lens, or needing a barrier between himself and the thing he's looking at.

“I don't want to call you Bobby anymore.”

He goes still.

The uncertain one. A brief, visible tension through his shoulders, his jaw, the hand holding yours tightening by a fraction. His eyes flick to your face, and the light in them is guarded in a way you haven't seen from him before. Wary. Like you've touched something unexpectedly tender and he's bracing for what comes next.

You see the calculation, the quick processing, and you understand. He thinks this is the beginning of something else. A rejection. A pulling away. You're not Bobby, you'll never be Bobby, and I don't want the reminder. He's already building the wall behind his face, that smooth, easy mask he can slip back into, the charming nonchalance to protect himself. 

“You're not him,” you go on quickly. Before the wall finishes closing. “That's—that's the point. You're not him. You're something else. And it feels wrong to call you by another person's name when you're your own—” You fumble. Gesture at him, at the clearing, at everything. “Your own being. Your own person. Or—whatever you are. Whatever the word is. Entity?”

His jaw loosens, shoulders dropping a fraction. The wall stops building.

“What would you call me?” he asks quietly. Like the answer matters more than he wants to show.

“Maybe… BB?” You say it, and it feels right. Simple. Still him, still connected, but his. Not borrowed. Not a copy of a copy. “If that's okay?”

He's quiet for a long moment, simply gazing at you. The light shimmers on his face, and his expression shifts through layers. The careful architecture of Better Bobby rearranging itself around this new information, this small, enormous thing you've just given him. A name. His own name. Not the one he stole. The one you chose.

You lean your head against his shoulder lightly.

You can feel it through the contact between you, through the place where your temple rests against his shoulder. Something in him settles. Deepens. A satisfaction so total it's almost palpable, like a beam slotting into place.

He likes it. Being seen as separate, being known as his own being. Not the understudy, not a replacement, not the better version of someone else, but simply a version of himself. You can feel how much he likes it in the way his thumb resumes its slow circuit over your knuckles, in the way his head tips to rest on yours, in the breath he lets out that sounds like it's been held for centuries.

“BB,” he repeats, testing it. His voice comes in a low, warm rumble. Bobby's timbre with something deeper underneath, and the two letters sit in the balmy air, small and perfect.

“Yeah,” you breathe. “BB.” A beat, then, “Thank you. For hearing me.”

A hum starts low in his chest, a thrum you feel before you hear it. It travels the length of his arm to where his fingers are laced through yours. He squeezes once, and when he speaks again, the easy charm has drained out of his voice, leaving it quieter, almost reticent.

“I was lonely too,” he admits.

Your heart squeezes, quick and helpless.

You sit together for a long, long time, the light pooling thick and lazy around you. And for the first time since you fell through the wall, what settles in your chest isn't fear, isn't confusion, and not grief.

It's peace.

The walk back is different.

BB leads you through the same threshold, and the yellow returns, followed by the buzz that resettles on your skin like a coat you forgot you were wearing. But something in you has shifted. Loosened. The meadow is still sitting inside your chest, warm and quiet. You carry it back into Level 0 the way you'd carry a cupped handful of water.

And you're talking.

Actually talking. Not the halting, guarded exchanges of the past weeks. Or the questions that go in circles, the silences that stretch like hallways.

You're talking, and BB is listening. Somewhere between the threshold and the familiar territory of your room, you say something about Clark—about the time Clark tried to assemble a display bookshelf himself and got the shelves in upside down, and you'd had to redo the entire thing at midnight while Clark stood behind you insisting it looked fine—and BB laughs.

It's a good laugh. It's Bobby's laugh. Low, surprised, that huff through the nose that real Bobby does when something catches him off guard, and it makes you smile. Actually smile. Your cheeks ache with it. 

You can't remember the last time your face did that.

“He sounds like an idiot,” BB remarks, grinning. That cocky half-grin, the one that crinkles one eye.

“He's not—okay, he's a little bit of an idiot. But he means well. He’s just going through a rough patch right now. He doesn't know how to—”

“Accept help?”

“I was going to say read an instruction manual.”

BB snorts. “Same thing.” 

He bumps your shoulder with his. Easy. Playful. And you bump him back, and the normalcy of it—the sheer, stupid, ordinary normalcy of walking and talking and bumping shoulders with someone—is so sweet it makes your throat tight with a different kind of ache. An emotion closer to joy, which is worse because joy in a place like this is borrowed. 

“You know,” you begin, squinting at him, “for a—” You stop, gesturing vaguely at him. “You're not bad company.”

“Not bad company.” He puts his hand over his chest. Bobby's mock-wounded face, the one real Bobby used to pull when you beat him at cards. “I'm overcome with emotion.”

“Shut up.”

“No, no, I'm serious. I'm going to treasure this moment. Not bad company. I'm getting that tattooed.”

“Can you even get a tattoo?”

His mouth hooks into that infuriating half-smirk that unfailingly warmed your blood for years, “Baby, I can do whatever I—”

He stops.

Mid-word. Mid-stride. His body goes rigid so fast it's like watching someone get hit with a current. Every muscle locking at once, his hand tightening on yours hard enough to hurt. His head turns. Not the way a person turns their head. The way a thing turns. Too sharp, too angular, his chin cocking to one side at a degree that doesn't belong on a human neck with a faint click. His eyes go flat and dark, and the creature behind them surges to the surface, breaching deep water.

You suck in a breath, eyes snapping around you, searching. “BB?”

He doesn't answer. He's listening. Every line of his body orients toward something you can't hear, his nostrils flaring slightly, and the hum in the walls shifts tone. Barely. A semitone. Like the whole level just inhaled.

“BB, what—”

He moves.

He doesn't explain. His hand releases yours and both of his are on your shoulders, turning you, walking you. Fast, with an urgency you haven't seen from him before, not even with the strange thing in the hallway. His jaw is set, eyes scanning the corridor with a focus that's mechanical, inhuman, processing information from sources you can't perceive.

“Please talk to me—”

“Shh.”

It’s not BB's voice. But an older rumble. Something that's done calculating, moved on to acting, and doesn't have the bandwidth for warmth right now.

He takes you to your room. The warm nest. The blankets. He guides you down with one hand on the back of your head, the way you'd ease someone into a car, pulling the blankets around you, and you grab his wrist because his eyes are wrong. They're flat, black, and old.

The thing in the hallway, whatever it is, has made him become the thing he was in the dark with the Smiler, and that version of BB is a version you can't reach.

“Stay here,” he instructs sternly. His voice is low and tight, thrumming with that sub-frequency that vibrates in the walls. “Don't move. Don't make a sound.”

“What's happening? What's—”

“Stay.”

He looks at you. One second. A flash of the warmth—buried deep, almost submerged, but there, still—and then his expression closes like a door slamming. BB straightens and turns toward the hallway.

You blink, and he's gone.

Just gone. Between one blink and the next, the space where BB stood is empty. The air where his body was is settling, displaced, like water closing over the place where a stone sank. 

The hum holds its earlier shifted note. That slightly wrong semitone, tense and high, like a held breath.

You sit in the blankets with your knees pulled to your chest, heart in your throat, and stare at the empty doorway and beyond it, listening intently.

Nothing. No tearing. No shrieking. No sounds at all. Just the hum and the buzz and your own breathing and the silence so total it frightens you more. 

You wait.

The meadow is still inside you: the bird, the stream, the warm light, the way BB laughed when you told him about Clark's bookshelf. The stupid, gentle joke about the tattoo, the way his shoulder bumped yours, and you bumped him back, and for thirty seconds, you forgot where you were and what he was, and the whole impossible situation felt like a walk home from somewhere good with someone you liked.

You press your face into your knees. You wrap your arms around yourself.

You wait.

BB comes back eventually.

You don't know how long it's been. Time in the Backrooms is a broken clock. Sometimes the minutes stretch into hours; sometimes what feels like an afternoon is over before a thought can finish forming. 

You've been sitting in the blankets, knees to chest, listening to the hum slowly, slowly settle back to its normal pitch, the tension of Level 0 releasing one degree at a time. You didn't sleep. You didn't move. You just sat and breathed, holding the meadow inside you like a candle flame in cupped hands.

You hear him before you see him. Footsteps. Slow. The particular rhythm of his walk. Bobby's gait, but smoother, more intentional, the way a predator moves even when it's not hunting. Then his shape appears in the doorway.

Something's off.

He's standing the way he always stands—one shoulder against the doorframe, hip cocked, that easy lean—but the details are wrong. Slightly. His edges are too sharp. The line of his jaw looks as if it were drawn rather than grown. His skin has a quality to it, like wet paint, freshly applied. And his eyes.

BB’s eyes are settling. That's the only word for it. The flat, black depth that swallowed the warmth when he left is receding, draining away, and Bobby's eyes are rising to the surface again. You watch it happen. You watch him reassemble himself.

He was something else, you realise. Whatever he went to do, wherever he did while away, he dropped Bobby's face to do it. And what you're looking at now, standing in the doorway, is the process of putting it back on. Climbing back inside the shape of a person. Buttoning up the human suit.

“BB.”

He blinks. The last of the darkness drains from his eyes. He looks at you, and the warmth returns. In layers, like watching a photograph develop, his shoulders relaxing at the sight of you. The too-sharp lines of his face soften into the Bobby you know, and his mouth does that almost-smile, the one that says I'm here without words.

“Hey, baby.”

“What happened?”

Not a question. A demand. You say it flat and steady, holding his gaze, and you don't let him do the easy-grin deflection, the don't worry about it. You've had enough of that for one lifetime. You made him promise.

BB reads it on your face. The refusal to be contained.

He exhales through his nose—Bobby's habit, the one that means I don't want to talk about this, but I'm going to—and pushes off the doorframe and comes to sit beside you on the blankets. Close. His knee touches yours.

“There's something new,” he says after a pause. “In the Backrooms. Something I haven't encountered before.”

You stare. “An… entity?”

“Yes.” He turns the word over like he's not sure it's sufficient. “It’s been… circling. Mainly the perimeter of Level 0. Not entering. Not yet anyway. Just... moving along the edge. Testing it.” His jaw works. That muscle at the hinge, the one that flexes when Bobby's thinking, when Bobby's holding something back. “It's been doing it intermittently. Coming close, then retreating. Like it's taking measurements.”

A shiver skitters down your spine. “What does it want?”

“I don't know.” And you understand that BB doesn't say I don't know often or easily. BB is the thing that knows this place, that moves through it like blood through a vein, that owns Level 0. Admitting ignorance is not in his nature. It sits wrong on his face, like a shirt buttoned crooked. “It's different from the others. Not like the Smiler. Not like the Howlers, either. Not like anything in my experience. It's very new.” A tense pause, then, “And very, very powerful.”

The way he says powerful makes the hum in the walls dip. Just for a second. A brief, almost subliminal drop in frequency, as if Level 0 itself heard the word and flinched.

You stare at him, your heart thrumming in your chest. Bobby's face, creased with a concern that doesn't quite fit the cocky architecture of it. BB in a rare moment of honesty about his own limits. Something new, he said. Something powerful. Something that makes a thing that unmade another entity with its bare hands sit next to you on a pile of blankets and admit it doesn't have an answer.

You exhale, turning to stare at the yellow wall instead. 

“I want you to teach me,” you tell him after a moment.

His head turns. The dog-tilt. Quick, surprised.

You look back towards him. “About this place. The levels. The entities. The doors, the rules, whatever—I want to understand it. I don't want to just—” You gesture at the blankets, the room, the warm patch you've been sleeping in for however long you've been here. “I don't want to be something you put in a nest and guard. I want to know what's out there. How to move through it. I don't want to be helpless whenever you leave.”

BB studies you. That long, reading look, line by line, extracting meaning. You expect resistance. Protectiveness. The instinct to keep you in the soft, warm place where nothing can touch you, where he can fold himself around you like armour and pretend the world ends at the walls of this room.

Instead, slowly, he nods.

“There are rules,” he insists. The caution is audible. Measured, considered, a thing that’s used to absolute control, negotiating the edges of a concession. “I go with you. Always. You don't wander alone. Not until you understand enough.”

“Okay.”

“And there are levels I won't take you to. Places where my presence doesn't offer the protection it does on 0. Places where—” He pauses, choosing his words the way you'd choose a path through uneven ground. “Places where going would be… foolish.”

“Okay. Deal.”

You watch him watch you, just like earlier in the sunlight. “Okay,” he says eventually. “I'll teach you.”

Time passes.

You don't know how much. The Backrooms don't have seasons, don't have sunrise and sunset. No reliable Monday into Tuesday into Wednesday that structures a life on the other side of the wall. What you have is rhythm—the rhythm of sleep and waking, of walking and resting, of BB's hand on yours as he leads you through doorways you're learning to see.

You miss the real world.

It hits you at strange moments. 

Not when you'd expect, not during the long stretches of yellow or the nights when the hum shifts pitch and BB goes rigid and watchful beside you. It hits you in the quiet. In the nothing moments.

You'll be sitting in the nest sketching a corridor layout, and the pen will skip, and you'll shake it the way you used to shake the pens at Clark's register. And the muscle memory will drag the whole world through. 

The smell of the showroom, lemon polish and particleboard, the radio playing low from the boombox behind the counter, the particular quality of California dusk through the front windows when the strip mall parking lot emptied out.

The apartment. The couch. The sound of Bobby's camera clicking in the other room.

You miss rain. Not Level 14 rain, or drizzle of the Poolrooms. Actual rain, East Bay winter rain, the kind that hammered the apartment windows and turned the parking lot at Clark's into a shallow lake and made Bobby curse because he'd left the car windows cracked again.

You miss the smell of wet asphalt. You even miss traffic. The dull boredom of a slow Tuesday shift with no customers, leaning on the counter with a magazine, watching the clock crawl toward closing.

You miss cereal. The specific crunch of it, dry, eaten by the handful out of the box at midnight because you were too tired to make real food after a close. You miss the weight of your own blankets on your bed, not the gathered nest-pile BB assembled for you. You miss the answering machine clicking on. You miss the phone ringing at all.

You think about going back.

Not the way you thought about it in the first weeks. That was rantic, clawing, animal desperation to find the wall you fell through and push back to the other side. That's burned out. What's left is quieter. More deliberate. A slow, circular calculation that runs in the background of your brain like a programme you can't close: Is there a way? If BB knows the doors, if the doors go between levels, if levels connect to each other in ways that don't follow geometry, could one of them connect back? Could there be a threshold that opens onto Clark's storage basement, onto the real world?

You don't ask BB. Because the calculation always stalls at the same place, the same, indestructible wall. 

The wall in your chest. The one built from the last six months of your life in Santa Clara, from every unanswered question and unfinished sentence and cold sheet and blue TV light and grunt. 

The wall that asks one simple question: Go back to what?

Go back to the apartment where Bobby looked through you like glass? Go back to the doorway where you stood with your keys in your hand and your heart in your eyes, and he didn't look up? Go back to being the woman who measures love in deficits, who keeps count of kisses the way she keeps count of inventory, watching the numbers dwindle, knowing exactly what the shortage means, and not being able to stop counting.

Bobby is probably relieved.

The thought arrives fully formed, mid-step, on a walk through Level 4, and it stops you so completely that BB turns back, his hand sliding to the small of your back, his head doing that quick, concerned tilt. You wave him off. Fine. I'm fine. But the thought is there now, lodged behind your sternum like a splinter, and you can feel it every time you breathe.

Bobby is probably relieved. Bobby is probably sleeping diagonally again. Bobby is probably eating cereal over the sink, leaving his bowl on the counter. Watching TV with his feet up and the apartment is probably messier, quieter. Less cluttered without your books and your magazines and your shoes by the door.

Your presence in every corner asking to be noticed. 

Bobby is probably lighter, breathing easier. Maybe he looked up from the television one day and realised the doorway was empty and felt—what? Guilt? Or the guilty cousin of relief, the exhale of a man whose obligation to pretend has been finally lifted?

You haven't felt needed in months. Not once.

The realisation surfaces slowly, a gradual saturation of a truth you've been standing ankle-deep in since before you fell through the wall. 

Bobby didn't need you. Bobby needed the idea of you—the girlfriend, the warm body, the person in the apartment who made it feel less empty—but he didn't need you. The particular, inconvenient you who wanted to be talked to and looked at and held and kissed goodbye every morning. That version of you was too much work. 

That version required maintenance he couldn't be bothered to perform.

But the ache—god, the ache. It hasn't faded. You thought it would. You thought time and distance and the sheer alien absurdity of your circumstances would erode it the way the Backrooms erode seemingly everything. Until the original shape is unrecognisable. 

But the ache for Bobby sits in the centre of your chest like a second heartbeat, stubborn and alive, and it doesn't care that he let you down.

It doesn't care that the last thing he gave you was a grunt. Love has no quality control. Love doesn't audit the recipient and adjust its intensity based on merit. 

You still love Bobby with the same enormous, stupid devotion you loved him with on that Thursday morning when the sun was on the sheets and he ignored the phone and pulled you closer and rasped stay. That love has not diminished by a single degree despite every reason it should have, and the persistence of it is the cruellest thing about being here. 

Because it means you’re aching for a man who made you feel invisible while standing in front of a being who has never once looked away.

You cry about it. Once. In the nest, in the dark, turned away from BB, muffling it in the blankets.

He doesn't say anything. His hand finds your shoulder. His thumb moves, once, twice, a slow circuit over the curve of bone. He doesn't ask what's wrong because he already knows—he's always known, he heard it all through the wall—and the kindness of his silence, the restraint of it, the choice to hold space instead of fill it, makes you cry harder.

You stop crying. You wipe your face. You pick up the notebook.

And you start mapping instead.

BB finds the notebook for you. God knows where, god knows how, a composition book with a mottled black-and-white cover and pages that smell like basement storage. 

You hold it and the weight of it in your hands feels so familiar it aches. The pen he gives you is a ballpoint, blue ink, the cheap kind that skips if you press too hard. You uncap it and the click of the cap settles something in your chest. An old reflex. The same one that used to kick in when you opened the inventory binder at the store. 

The satisfaction of a system, a structure, a way to organise chaos into a shape you can hold.

If you can't go back, you'll go forward. If you can't be needed there, you'll be needed here. Anything but the slow decay of being unwanted. And then, one day, when you're ready, you'll ask BB to find you a door back.

One day.

Level 0 comes first. The hallways you know, the ones BB takes you through, the turns and junctions and the places where the carpet changes texture and means something. A border, a threshold, a shift in territory. 

You draw diagrams. Floor plans. Rough, imprecise, the proportions wrong because the proportions are wrong. Because the hallways don't obey geometry in any way you can verify. But the act of drawing them—of putting pen to paper, using the things Clark used to tell you about rendering shapes and rooms—makes it less vast. Less formless. Containable. 

The pen moves and the world shrinks and for the first time in months you have purpose.

BB watches you work with undisguised fascination.

He sits beside you while you sketch, his chin on your shoulder, his breath warm on your neck, and sometimes he corrects you (that corridor turns left, not right or there's a junction there you haven't found yet) and sometimes he just watches your hand move and hums in his throat. That low, warm rumble that you've started to associate with contentment. 

His chin digs into your shoulder when he leans in to see your shorthand and you flick his nose without looking up and he huffs—offended, amused, delighted, nosing closer—and the exchange is so easy, so thoughtless, so much like two people who’ve known each other long enough that the edges have been worn smooth by repetition.

Half the time you forget he's not human.

That's the truth you don't examine too closely. Because it would mean confronting what it says about you, about your standards, about how broken your idea of normal has become. 

But BB sits beside you with his chin on your shoulder and his warmth against your side. He asks about your shorthand, remembers the answer, asks follow-up questions. He brings you food without being asked.

The line between an inhuman entity wearing a man's face and a person who cares about me blurs until it's less a line and more a smudge, a gradation, a slow dissolve from one thing into the other.

He cares for you. Genuinely. Not the way you care for a pet. 

You see it in the small things first. The way he checks the temperature of the carpet before he lets you sit, and how he positions himself between you and the corridor when you sleep. His head turns toward you when you shift in the nest, tracking your movement the way a compass tracks north. 

Most of all in how he says your name. Not baby, not the endearment—your actual name, the one he uses rarely, carefully, like he's holding it in his mouth and tasting each syllable. When BB says your name, it sounds like a discovery. Like a fact he's still pleased to know.

“You're organising it,” he says one day. Amused. Impressed. “The way you organised the inventory at the store.”

“It helps me think.”

“You're applying human systems to a place that doesn't follow human rules.”

“Is that a problem?”

He considers this. His head tilts. “No,” he replies slowly, like he's arriving at a conclusion that surprises him. “No, I think it might be… useful. No one's ever tried to map it like this. Most wanderers are too busy surviving to catalogue."

“Well,” you say teasingly. “I've got you for the surviving part.”

He goes quiet. You glance up from the notebook. His face is going through layers again, rearranging, the cocky default giving way to the newer expression underneath. The one that showed up when you named him. A door opening inward.

He catches you looking, and the default snaps back, the half-grin, the raised eyebrow.

“Yeah,” he drawls lightly. Entirely failing to conceal the sudden warmth radiating off him like heat from a furnace. “Yeah, you do.”

You add to the notebook every day. Layouts, landmarks, and the sensory details that serve as navigation. 

BB takes you exploring.

Not every day. Some days the hum is wrong, or BB is tense in a way he won't explain, or you can feel the level holding its breath the way it did the night he disappeared and came back wearing a freshly assembled face. On those days, you stay in the nest. You write in the notebook. You read the pages you've already filled and trace the paths you've already walked and commit them to memory because memory is the only filing system you've got. 

On those days, the ache comes back—Bobby's hands, Bobby's mouth, the way he used to drop his forehead against yours in the dark and whisper your name, just your name, over and over—and you let it sit in your chest and you don't fight it. But you don't follow it, either. 

You just write around it. Inventory the grief the way you inventory everything else. Label it. File it. Move on to the next entry.

But most days, BB takes you out.

Level 1, first. BB walks beside you, and his posture changes here. Subtly mostly, the ease tightening into a coiled attention. His head on a swivel, hand at the small of your back with a pressure that says I'm tracking everything in this room and nothing will get within twenty feet of you.

You sketch the layout in the notebook while he stands guard. You mark the exits, the supply caches, the places where other wanderers have left graffiti on the shelving units. Messages, warnings, crude maps of their own.

You get braver. You ask questions. About the Smilers, the Howlers, about the hierarchy of things that live here. How they relate to each other and what makes some dangerous and some merely present. 

BB answers. Not always fully, not always clearly. There are concepts here that he doesn't have a human language for. Mechanics that exist in the gap between what he perceives and what your brain can hold, but he answers, and you write it all down, and the notebook fills.

You develop a routine. You wake up, eat whatever BB has found or produced, and you walk. You explore together, map, and come back. You sit together in the nest afterwards and talk. 

And the talking is easier now, less charged, less careful. You tell him about your life. The books you loved. The way you used to organise your bookshelves by colour rather than by author, because it made you happy to look at them. The hiking trails in the Santa Cruz Mountains, Big Basin and Castle Rock, the way the redwoods smelled after rain.

He listens the way he always listens. Total attention. Full presence. The thing Bobby couldn't do. The thing BB does like breathing.

And you catch yourself, one evening, doing something unthinkable. 

You’re sitting in the nest with your notebook open, pen behind your ear, telling BB about the time you got lost on the Skyline-to-the-Sea trail. You had to navigate back using a park map you'd annotated so heavily it was more your handwriting than cartography. BB’s laughing. That low huff through his nose, his shoulder pressed against yours. 

You're laughing too, and the yellow light is warm, and you realise, suddenly, that you haven’t thought about Bobby in three days.

The guilt is instantaneous.

A hot, lurching, physical thing that grabs you by the sternum and pulls. Three days. You went three days without the ache, and the absence of it feels like a betrayal so total it makes you nauseous. As if the love you carry for Bobby is a fire that requires constant tending, and you let it gutter, and that makes you—what? 

The kind of woman who forgets? The kind who moves on? The kind who finds comfort in a pair of borrowed eyes while the original owner of those eyes is somewhere in Santa Clara, probably sleeping diagonal, probably relieved?

You go quiet. BB notices. 

His shoulder presses against yours (a question, not a demand), and you shake your head, picking up the pen. Start sketching a corridor you mapped that morning, but the lines are slightly too hard, the ink pressing dents into the page. 

BB watches your hand and says nothing, and the nothing is the right thing, the exact right thing, and you hate him a little for being so consistently, unbearably right.

You grow comfortable.

Not comfortable like safe, or comfortable like home. Because this place is neither of those things, and you know it. The notebook full of entity classifications and danger ratings is proof that you know it.

But comfortable the way you get with a person—a being, entity, a whatever-he-is—when enough time has passed that their presence stops being a question and starts being an answer. 

You stop flinching when he appears in doorways. You stop tensing when his hand finds yours. You lean into his shoulder when you're tired, and he holds steady. The meadow on Level 14 becomes your Sunday, your weekend, the place he takes you when the yellow gets to be too much, and you need to remember what sky looks like.

You stop keeping count.

You don't notice it happening. It's quiet cessation of a habit so ingrained you didn't know it was still running until it stopped. 

No more tallying. No more, he didn't today, that's the fourth day in a row. Because BB doesn't generate deficits. BB doesn't create gaps to count. He’s present the way the hum is present. Woven into the structure of your days so thoroughly that his attention isn't an event anymore, it's an environment. 

You live inside his attention the way you live inside Level 0. It's just where you are.

But the ache for Bobby doesn't go away. Only migrates from the centre of your chest to somewhere deeper, somewhere quieter, a room in the back of you where it can sit with the memory of your first kiss and his arm around your shoulder by the ocean and the way he used to say stay and mean it. 

You don't visit that room every day anymore. But you know it's there. You can feel its weight when you lie down at night, BB's arm around your waist, his breath on your neck. 

The ache says remember, and you say I know, and you close your eyes, and you stay.

Your handwriting fills the notebook. Page after page. The careful, slightly messy script. A system. A structure. 

A way to survive.

“It's circling again.”

You look up sharply. 

BB is standing at the edge of the nest, head tilted, that almost-human listening posture—chin cocked, eyes unfocused, his whole body oriented toward a frequency you can't hear. His jaw is tight.

You set the pen down. “How close?”

“Closer than last time,” ee says evenly, too evenly. “It's running along the edge and then pulling back. Then running a little further.”

Ignoring the sudden chill at your nape, you say, “Like it's looking for a gap.”

His eyes flick to you. A beat of surprise follows. Quick and subtle, the kind he still has when you demonstrate that you've been paying attention to the lessons, that the notebook isn't just busywork but comprehension.

“Yes,” he agrees. “Like that.”

You pull your knees up. Wrap your arms around them. The notebook sits open on the blanket beside you, the page half-covered in your shorthand. A corridor map, danger annotations, the new symbol you invented last week for an unknown entity, and behaviour unclassified. You used it for the first time yesterday. The ink is still dark.

“What are you going to do?”

“I need to check the perimeter. See if anything's shifted. If it's been probing a specific section or moving along the full boundary.” He's already calculating. The ancient one surfaces behind Bobby's eyes, not all the way, just enough to sharpen the edges. To give his posture that predatory geometry that doesn't belong on a twenty-something in a crop top. “I want to understand its pattern before I kill it.”

“BB.” You say his name, and he stills. Focuses. The ancient thing recedes a fraction, and the warmth returns to the surface. You hold his gaze and say, carefully, gently, “Be careful.”

His mouth parts. 

He crosses the nest in two steps. Drops into a crouch in front of you, his knees on the blanket, and his hand finds the side of your head. His fingers glide over one side of your face slowly. He strokes, long, gentle, from your temple to the nape of your neck. 

“Stay here,” he says gently, his thumb tracing the curve behind your ear. “Stay in the nest. Don't go into the corridor. Not even the first junction.”

“I know the rules.”

“I know you know.” His hand stills in your hair, cupping the back of your skull. He dips his head until his forehead is close to yours, not quite touching, his breath warm on your face. His eyes are darker, layered, and the thing behind them is looking at you, too. For a moment, both of them are present. BB and the creature he's built on top of, and both of them are saying the same thing. “I'll be back.”

“You better be.”

The corner of his mouth lifts. Just barely. The private curve that's his and not Bobby's, the one you named into existence in a meadow on Level 14. He presses his lips to your forehead. Holds them there for a beat. You feel the hum vibrate through the contact, that low sub-frequency that lives in his chest and transfers through skin, settling behind your sternum like a second pulse.

Then he straightens. His hand slides from your hair. The softness drops from his posture in a single clean motion. 

What's left is the thing that walks these hallways, silent and certain and very, very old.

He rounds the corner, and the yellow swallows him.

You pick up the pen. Open the notebook to a fresh page. You write: Entity X — perimeter — closer. Testing the boundary for gaps. BB checking pattern. Unknown motivation. Unknown capability.

You underline unknown twice.

Eleven minutes.

You know this because you've been counting. 

Your brain just does it now, keeps a running tally of the seconds since his silhouette disappeared. Because your body has learned that when he's not here, the math of your survival changes. 

With him, you’re the safest thing in this strange place. Without him, you’re a girl sitting on a damp carpet in a place that eats people. But BB always comes back, you remind yourself. Always. 

You're sketching the rough map of the corridors you explored yesterday, trying to get the proportions right on a hallway junction that you're fairly sure had five walls, when you hear the footsteps.

Not his. His steps are almost silent, a predator's tread, weight distributed in a way that isn't quite human. These are boots. Multiple sets. Heavy, deliberate.

You close the notebook slowly.

Six figures come around the corner.

Not researchers BB warned you about. Wrong uniforms, wrong insignia, a logo you don't recognise stitched onto black tactical gear. They're armed. Not with the improvised weapons most wanderers carry. Real weapons. Professional grade. The kind that suggests funding, organisation, a chain of command that exists somewhere outside this place.

The one in front spots you and signals the others to stop. He says something into the radio on his shoulder, clipped and fast, and you catch the words “confirmed,” and “companion” and “entity absent.”

They waited for BB to leave.

“Ma'am.” The lead one steps forward. Voice flat. Professional. “You need to come with us. We're here to extract you.”

Your body tenses at those words, coiling, and you stand at once. “No.”

It comes out sharper than you expect. Hard-edged. The backrooms have made you harder than you realise.

“Ma'am, that's not—”

“I said no,” you repeat firmly. “I'm not going anywhere with a bunch of strangers.”

His jaw tightens. He glances at the others. Some signal passes between them. A shift in posture, a nod, the silent language you’re not privy to.

He reaches for your arm.

You hit him.

A closed fist, fast, driven by weeks of survival instinct and adrenaline and the specific, white-hot fury of being grabbed by a stranger in a place where the only person who touches you has earned it inch by inch.

Your knuckles connect with his cheekbone. The man’s head snaps sideways, and for one bright second, you feel savage satisfaction.

Then three of them are on you.

You kick. You bite. Drive your elbow into someone's throat and hear someone choke behind you. You're feral with it. No technique, no training, just the scrappy, vicious fighting of a girl who's survived the backrooms and is not going to be dragged by men who couldn’t even bother to introduce themselves. 

Your nails rake across someone's forearm and draw blood. You wrench free of one grip and slam your heel into a kneecap. Someone swears, loud, furious.

“Fucking—hold her, HOLD HER—”

A hand fists in your hair. Yanks. Your neck snaps back, and your eyes water. Someone wrenches your arm behind you hard enough that the joint screams. You thrash, snarling. Your free hand catches someone across the mouth. You feel a tooth cut your knuckle.

The lead one is in front of you again. There's a red mark blooming on his cheekbone where you hit him, and his professionalism has curdled into something uglier.

“You want to do this the hard way?”

You spit at him. It catches his vest.

He hits you.

Open palm across your face. Your head rocks to one side. The world around you whites out for half a second, and then there's carpet under your hands and knees. Your lip throbs, burning numb, and you can taste copper in your mouth, dribbling. A boot slots between your shoulder blades, pressing you flat, and your cheek presses against the damp fibres. 

Your wrists get pinned behind you roughly at an angle that sends bright, screaming pain up to your shoulder.

“Stay DOWN—”

You’re on the floor, bleeding. There’s a boot on your back and hands pinning your wrists. You’re away from the only safe thing in this place, and the carpet is wet against your split lip. You’re afraid. For the first time since your encounter with the Smiler, you’re terrified. Immediate, animal fear of being held down by someone stronger than you.

You open your mouth. You fill your lungs.

And you scream.

“BB—”

One word. It tears out of your throat raw and desperate, hitting the yellow walls, and the walls absorb it, and the walls move.

The fluorescent lights don't flicker. They detonate.

Every tube in the hallway blows simultaneously, glass raining down like ice, and in the darkness that follows, the hum of level 0 drops—drops—drops into a frequency that you feel in your teeth, in your ribs, in the boot on your back that suddenly isn't pressing as hard because the man wearing it has stopped breathing. Not dead. Frozen. 

The way an animal freezes in terror when it smells something at the top of the food chain.

The walls crack. Clean fissures running floor to ceiling, splitting the drywall in deliberate, surgical lines, as if something were tearing its way through the building's architecture. The carpet ripples under your cheek. You feel it. The backrooms responding, contracting, the whole of level 0 seizing like a body in pain.

The boot lifts off your back.

Not because the man chose to move it. Because the floor tilted. Subtle. Just enough to shift his weight. Just enough to free you. The backrooms—him, it, the thing that is both—clearing the path.

You hear them before you see them react. The soldiers. Breathing fast. The click of weapons being raised. Someone screaming “what the fuck what the fuck what the—”

He comes out of the dark.

Not through a door but from the dark itself. Like the darkness peeled open and someone stepped through the seam. 

He’s not fully human-shaped.

The Bobby suit is slipping. Shoulders too wide. Arms too long, hanging at angles that make your hindbrain scream. His fingers have too many joints—you can see them in the fractured emergency glow of the one tube that didn't shatter—long and wrong, curling like they're remembering a shape that predates hands. 

His face is still Bobby's face but the geometry behind it is pressing outward, cheekbones like blades, jaw too sharp, too angular, the skull beneath rearranging itself into something that was never meant to be looked at directly. And his eyes are black. Fully, completely, endlessly black. Two holes in the front of his skull that open onto something without a floor.

He sees you on the ground.

The blood on your lip. The bruises on your skin. The tear tracks cutting down your face.

BB sees the boot print on your back.

There’s a sound.

It booms from the walls, the floor, and the ceiling simultaneously. From every surface of level 0, because he is level 0, and every square inch of it is snarling.

The remaining fluorescent tube doesn't shatter. 

It melts. The glass softens and drips. The carpet under the soldiers' feet goes wet, soaked, saturated, as though the floor is turning into a swamp.

You press your face into the carpet and close your eyes.

It takes less than a minute.

You don't watch, but you hear it. Screaming that starts human and ends keening. Wet sounds. Heavy sounds. The particular acoustic signature of a body being opened by something that doesn't need tools. That horrible, snarling, clicking growl of pure rage.

One of them manages to fire a weapon, and the sound of the shot is enormous in the enclosed hallway. It cuts out, followed by a crunch of bone, and another, and another, and another—

Then there's nothing.

Silence.

The level settles. The hum reasserts itself, climbing back up from that sub-basement frequency to its usual buzz. You can feel it in the carpet against your cheek, scratchy and too warm.

One fluorescent tube fizzes back to life overhead. Yellow. Sickly. 

You feel the air change. The temperature drops, and you know he's close before anything touches you. 

When it does—a hand on your shoulder, delicate, so delicate—it's not quite a hand yet. Too many joints. The fingers too long, still retracting to Bobby's proportions, still remembering how to be the thing that strokes your hair instead of the thing that just—

You turn over.

He's crouching over you. Still wrong. The proportions haven't settled. BB’s arms are too long, and his spine is curved at an angle that doesn't work with human vertebrae. His face is a rough draft. Bobby's features sketched over the older, sharper one. Black fluid coats his hands. His jaw. His chest. Not all of it is black.

His eyes are still dark, but the blue is bleeding back in around the edges. Like ink dropped into water, spreading, reclaiming.

You reach for him.

Your hands are shaking so badly that you miss the first time. 

Your fingers slip against the wrong texture of his jaw, the skin too smooth, too cool, still settling back to its bony configuration. You reach again, and this time you get his neck (too long, the vertebrae too prominent, sharp ridges under your palms where Bobby's neck was smooth), and you pull.

You pull yourself into him, and you cling. 

Arms around his neck, face buried in his throat, legs curling up, making yourself as small as possible against his chest because if you can get close enough, maybe nothing will ever reach you again. 

You wrap yourself around him with a muffled sob. One sob, then another, then a third that breaks open into something ragged and ugly and not at all brave.

You’re shaking and bleeding, crying into the neck of a monster, and you don't care. You don't care about the wrong temperature, the wrong shape or the black fluid soaking into your shirt. 

You don't care.

BB freezes. One second. Two. The violence still running, the gentleness needing a moment to boot up. You feel it. The exact instant the system switches. His whole body shudders once, and then his arms come around you.

Tight. So tight. He scoops you up like you're nothing—one arm under your legs, one around your back—and pulls you into his chest and holds you against him like he's trying to absorb you. Like he could fold you into his body and keep you there where nothing touches you ever again. 

His chin comes down on the top of your head. His whole body curves around you. You feel the strength in every inch of him. The same strength that just did what it just did, repurposed. Every ounce of force that tore six armed men apart, now calibrated with impossible precision to the exact pressure of holding without breaking.

“I'm here.” His voice. Rough. Not fully Bobby's voice yet. There's an edge underneath it still, something vast and deep, like hearing someone speak from several floors down. “I'm here, baby. I'm here.”

You press closer. Your fingers curl into the fabric of his jacket. Bobby's jacket. Your face is against his throat, and you can feel the absence of a pulse under your cheek. No heartbeat. Just the hum. His hum. Vibrating through his chest and into yours.

“They—” Your voice is thick, muffled against his skin. “They grabbed me, they were trying to—I fought, I tried to—”

“I know.” His hand finds the back of your head. Cradles it. His fingers—the right number of joints now, almost fully Bobby-shaped again—thread into your hair the way they do in the nest, slow, gentle, the careful repetitive motion that means safe, you're safe, I'm here. “I know. It's over.”

“There were six of them and I couldn't—”

“You don't have to.”

His other hand finds your face. Tilts it up. His thumb traces your split lip with a touch so light it barely registers. Just the ghost of contact, the pad of his thumb skating over the cut, and you watch his jaw tighten. The blue in his eyes flickers. Darkness swims underneath it, surfacing and submerging, and you know he is looking at the blood on your mouth, and memorising who put it there, and the fact that they’re already dead is not enough. Will never be enough.

“Does it hurt?” Quiet. Bobby's voice now, almost entirely. That specific soft register he uses in the nest, the one that makes your chest ache.

“A little.”

His thumb moves to the bruise on your cheekbone. Traces the edge of it. Down to your jaw. Along the finger-shaped marks on your wrist, and the sound he makes is barely audible. Low, tight snarl. A vibration caught behind his teeth.

“I should have been here.”

“You came.”

“Not fast enough.”

You almost laugh. What comes out instead is a wet, clogged sound. “You came very quickly, BB.”

“Not fast enough,” he repeats, and means it. 

You put your head back against his chest. He holds you tighter. He hums. Shaky at first, the frequency wobbles. Then it steadies. Finding its rhythm. His song. The one that doesn't exist anywhere outside of him.

You feel the backrooms settle around you both. The lights dim softer. Temperature rises, degree by gentle degree, until the air feels like a room in a house instead of a hallway in purgatory. He’s doing that. Rewriting the space around your body because you’re shaking, and he can't make you stop shaking, but he can make everything else softer.

“BB.” Your voice is small. Muffled against his chest.

“Yeah?” Immediate. Soft.

“Don't leave.” You swallow. Press your face harder into the fabric of his jacket. “Just—for a bit. Don't leave.”

His arms tighten, cheek pressing against the top of your head. You feel him breathe—not because he needs to, but because you need to feel it, and he knows what you need, even before you know it yourself.

“Never,” he whispers.

One word. A law. Written into the fabric of this place. Never. As in: the sun will come up. As in: water runs downhill. As in: I will be here.

You close your eyes.

The shaking ebbs, not all at once but in increments, your body releasing its grip on the panic the way a fist unclenches. One finger, then another, then another. His hand keeps moving over your hair. Rhythmic. Patient. He will do this for as long as you need.

He will do this forever if you let him.

You stay like that. On the floor. In the hallway. Curled in the lap of a thing that’s just killed six men.

The backrooms are changing. You can feel it beneath you, a shuddering grind. Hallways folding. Routes sealing shut. The architecture of level 0 quietly, methodically, permanently rearranging itself around you both. Doors that used to lead here now lead nowhere. 

He’s taking you somewhere no one will find you.

And you let him. Eyes closed. Face against his chest. Listening to the hum.

You let him.

M.E.G. INTERNAL — MAJOR EXPLORER GROUP

DEPARTMENT OF ENTITY RESEARCH & CONTAINMENT

▓▓▓▓▓▓ CLASSIFIED // LEVEL 4 — RESTRICTED // URGENT REVIEW ▓▓▓▓▓▓

INCIDENT REPORT: IR-0-27 DOCUMENT ID: MEG-ENT-0000-IR-0-27 CLASSIFICATION: LEVEL 4 — URGENT FILED BY: Operations Director ██████ DATE: ██/██/199█ RE: Unauthorised Engagement With Entity 0 / Companion — Hostile Extraction Attempt by External Agency STATUS: CRITICAL — ONGOING CONSEQUENCES

SUMMARY OF INCIDENT

On ██/██/199█, at approximately ██:██ hours, a six-person tactical unit operating under the authority of ██████████████████████████████████ (hereafter "the Agency") conducted an unauthorised extraction attempt on the individual designated "the Companion" in M.E.G. Entity 0 documentation.

M.E.G. had no advance knowledge of this operation. We were not consulted or informed. We were not given the opportunity to do what we have spent the last eighteen months doing, which is explicitly and repeatedly recommending against exactly this course of action.

Our recommendation, stated in Section 7.2 of the Entity 0 dossier and reiterated in no fewer than six inter-agency memoranda, was as follows:

"Do not intervene. Do not extract. Do not, under any circumstances, threaten the Companion's safety within Entity 0's perceptual range."

The Agency disregarded this recommendation.

All six members of the tactical unit are dead.

RECONSTRUCTION OF EVENTS

The following timeline has been assembled from recovered equipment (three body cameras, one partially functional radio unit) and corroborating seismic data from M.E.G. monitoring equipment on Levels 0 through 3.

██:██ — Six-person tactical unit enters Level 0 via access point ██████. Equipment and insignia consistent with ██████████████████████████████████. The unit is armed with ██████████████████████████████████. They are equipped for a hostile extraction. This was not a rescue. This was a retrieval.

██:██ — Unit locates the Companion in a hallway junction on Level 0, sublevel ██████. Entity 0 is not present. Body camera footage confirms the unit waited for Entity 0 to leave the Companion's immediate vicinity before approaching. This indicates prior surveillance. The Agency was watching. We did not know they were watching. This is itself a security failure that is being reviewed separately.

██:██ — Unit lead makes verbal contact with the Companion. Instructs her to comply with the extraction. Companion refuses. She states clearly, on camera, that she does not wish to be removed. Her exact words are "No" and "I'm not going anywhere."

██:██ — Unit lead attempts physical restraint. The Companion resists violently. Body camera footage shows her striking the unit lead in the face, drawing blood from a secondary operative, and disabling a third with a knee strike before being subdued by multiple operatives simultaneously. She fought like someone who has been surviving the Backrooms for ██████, and it shows. The Companion is subsequently struck across the face by the unit lead and forced to the ground. Bruising consistent with forcible restraint is visible on both wrists.

I will repeat that for the record: a civilian who had clearly, verbally, on camera refused extraction was beaten to the floor by a six-person tactical unit. 

██:██ — M.E.G. seismic monitoring stations on Levels 0, 1, 2, and 3 register a simultaneous anomalous event. The reading does not correspond to any known geological or structural phenomenon. Dr. ██████ has described the waveform as "an earthquake." I am including her analysis verbatim because I do not have a better description.

██:██ — The Companion screams.

██:██ — Entity 0 arrives.

The gap between ██:██ and ██:██ is approximately 1.3 seconds. Entity 0's last confirmed position was ██████████████████████████████████, an estimated █████████████ meters from the Companion's location. It covered this distance in 1.3 seconds. We do not have a theoretical framework for this. We are not going to develop one. It doesn't matter. What matters is what happened next.

██:██ (CONCURRENT) — What we did not understand at the time—and what has only become clear through post-incident analysis—is that Entity 0 did not move through the Backrooms to reach the Companion. It moved the Backrooms.

Temporal monitoring equipment across Levels 0 through 266 recorded simultaneous, catastrophic time distortion events at the moment of Entity 0's displacement. On Level 1, clocks ran backwards for approximately 3.7 seconds. On Level 2, a monitoring team reported experiencing the same eleven-second interval twenty times in succession. On Level 49, two operatives aged approximately 6 years in the space of 1.3 real-time seconds. Medical examination confirmed accelerated cellular turnover consistent with temporal compression. Both operatives have been placed on medical leave.

Entity 0 tore through the temporal fabric of the Backrooms to close the distance between itself and the Companion. It did not navigate. It did not transit. It ripped a hole through the structure of the intervening space.

The damage on the lower levels was temporary. The damage on Level ███ was not.

Level ███ is gone.

Level ███—a fully mapped, documented, and intermittently populated level of the Backrooms—no longer exists. It was not sealed. M.E.G. operatives who attempted to access Level ███ via three separate confirmed entry points found nothing. Not empty corridors. Not blank walls. Nothing. The space that Level ███ occupied is simply absent. As though it was never there at all. 

Entity 0's transit path between its last confirmed location and the Companion passed directly through Level ███. The conclusion is unavoidable: Entity 0, in the 1.3 seconds it took to reach the Companion, annihilated an entire level of the Backrooms as collateral damage. The way a bullet destroys the wall behind the target. Level ███ was simply in the way.

We do not know if there were casualties. Level ███ was classified as intermittently populated. Wanderers passed through; some may have been sheltering there at the time of the event. We will likely never know. There is nothing left to recover. There is nothing left to examine. An entire level of reality was erased in 1.3 seconds.

Dr. ██████ has requested that this section of the report be classified as Level 5. I have denied this request. Everyone needs to read this. Everyone needs to understand what we are dealing with.

██:██ through ██:██ — Body camera footage for this period is partially corrupted. What remains has been reviewed by myself, Dr. ██████, and Dr. ███████████. Dr. ████ has declined to review it. Her decision is respected.

Entity 0 was not in its standard manifestation. I am not going to describe the specific deviations in this report. The footage is available for personnel with Level 4 clearance and a strong stomach.

The engagement lasted approximately 42 seconds.

Entity 0 did not use weapons. Entity 0 is the weapon.

All six operatives were killed. Cause of death for four: ████████████████████████ Cause of death for the remaining two: ██████████████████████████████████. Recovery of remains has been deemed inadvisable at this time, as Entity 0 ██████████████████████████████████.

██:██ — Final body camera footage shows Entity 0 approaching the Companion. It is partially restructured to its usual template, but not fully. The Companion does not retreat. She reaches for it. She clings to it. Entity 0 gathers her. The word "cradles" appears in three separate reviewer notes, and I am allowing it despite its lack of clinical precision because nothing else is accurate, and assumes a protective posture. Audio, though degraded, captures the Companion's voice saying something indistinct, and Entity 0 responding with a single word. Audio analysis has been unable to confirm the word. Dr. ██████ believes it was "never." The camera fails shortly after.

ASSESSMENT OF CONSEQUENCES

I said in Section 7.2 of the Entity 0 dossier that I did not want to see what it does to us. I have now seen it. I was right not to want to.

But the killings are not the primary concern of this report. Soldiers die. Operations fail. This is the nature of work in the Backrooms. The primary concern is what this incident has done to years of carefully maintained observational neutrality between M.E.G. and Entity 0.

Entity 0 tolerated us. That is not an exaggeration or a simplification. We have operated monitoring equipment on Level 0 for eighteen months. Entity 0 knew it was there. It knew we were watching. And it allowed it, the way a homeowner allows a bird to nest in their gutter. Not because they approve, but because it doesn't bother them enough to act.

That tolerance is, as of this incident, in question.

Within 48 hours of IR-0-27, the following changes were observed:

Level ███ remains nonexistent. Repeated attempts to locate it via all known access points have failed. Dr. ██████ has formally recommended that it be struck from the Backrooms cartography index. The level is not missing. It was unmade. The temporal scarring along Entity 0's transit path shows no sign of healing or regeneration. This is, as far as we can determine, permanent. An entire level of the Backrooms has been permanently destroyed as a byproduct of Entity 0's emotional response to a threat against the Companion. 

M.E.G. monitoring equipment on Level 0, sublevel ██████ through ██████, ceased functioning. Not damaged. Removed. Every sensor, every camera, every seismic monitor. Gone. No debris. No evidence of destruction. The equipment is simply no longer there.

Three M.E.G. personnel conducting routine observation on Level 0 reported that the hallways they had used for months had "rearranged." Routes that previously led to confirmed Companion sighting locations now terminate in dead ends. Level 0 has been restructured. We believe Entity 0 has deliberately altered the architecture to prevent future observation.

The Companion has not been sighted since IR-0-27. She is not at any previously confirmed location. The blanket nest—documented across seven sighting reports as Entity 0's primary base of operation with the Companion—is empty. Every blanket, every scavenged item, every trace of habitation has been removed. As though no one was ever there.

Entity 0 has not been sighted on Level 0 since IR-0-27.

The implication is clear: Entity 0 has relocated the Companion. To where, we do not know. Dr. ██████ has proposed that they may have moved to a sublevel of Level 0 that is not represented in our current mapping. A level beneath the level, a space that Entity 0 has carved out or always possessed and simply never used until now. Until it had a reason to hide something it could not afford to lose.

We have, in the space of one unauthorised operation conducted by an agency that ignored every warning we provided, lost the single greatest research asset in the history of M.E.G. entity studies. The Companion is gone. Our access is gone. Years of carefully accumulated observational data has been rendered functionally useless because the subject has moved to a location we cannot find and sealed the door behind it.

FORMAL OBJECTIONS

I want the following on the record:

M.E.G. explicitly, repeatedly, and in writing recommended against any attempt to extract, contain, or engage the Companion. These recommendations were provided to the Agency through proper inter-organisational channels on ██/██/198█, ██/██/198█, ██/██/198█, ██/██/199█, ██/██/199█, and ██/██/199█. Each was acknowledged. None were followed.

The Companion was not a hostage. She verbally refused extraction, clearly, and on camera. The Agency proceeded with force. This is not a rescue. This is an assault on a civilian by a government-adjacent organisation operating without jurisdiction inside a space they do not understand.

The Companion was injured. She fought back and was beaten to the ground for it. She bled. And the thing that has been protecting her heard her scream its name. We told them what it does to things that threaten what belongs to it. We told them. They didn't listen. At least six people are dead because they didn't listen.

Entity 0 has, until now, operated within a framework that M.E.G. was beginning to understand. It was predictable. Perhaps not in its actions, but in its priorities. The Companion was the variable. The Companion was the key. And now the Companion is gone, and Entity 0 has demonstrated that its response to perceived threats is not merely violent but architectural. It didn't just kill the threat. It restructured its entire domain to prevent the threat from recurring. It sealed Level 0. It erased its footprint. It took its Companion, and it disappeared.

An entire level of the Backrooms was destroyed. Gone. Erased from existence as collateral damage during Entity 0's transit. If there were wanderers sheltering on Level ███ they are dead. Or worse. Or something we don't have a word for because the space they occupied no longer exists in any meaningful sense. We will never know. The Agency's unauthorised operation may have cost lives far beyond the six operatives they sent in, and we have no way to calculate the true body count because there is nothing left to count.

We do not know where Entity 0 is. We do not know if it will allow future contact. We do not know if, the next time an M.E.G. operative enters Level 0, Entity 0 will distinguish between us and the Agency. We may have inherited the consequences of someone else's stupidity, and we may pay for it in personnel.

RECOMMENDATIONS

All M.E.G. operations on Level 0 are suspended indefinitely pending reassessment.

The Agency is to be formally censured and barred from independent Backrooms operations until further notice. Their response to this censure is noted and disregarded.

No further attempts to locate, contact, or extract the Companion are to be conducted by any organisation, under any authority, for any reason.

If—and I stress if—Entity 0 re-establishes contact with M.E.G. personnel, the interaction is to be treated as a diplomacy scenario, not a research scenario. Entity 0 is not a subject. Entity 0 is, functionally, a sovereign power that we have just watched an allied agency declare war on. We will conduct ourselves accordingly.

Someone needs to tell the Agency what "apex predator" means. I have included a dictionary to help and clear the confusion.

Filed: ██/██/199█

Operations Director ██████

Addendum, handwritten:

She screamed his name, and the level cracked open.

I've been doing this for eleven years. I have never seen a response that fast. 1.3 seconds. It wasn't travel. He didn't cross the distance. The distance stopped existing. She called, and the Backrooms folded to put him where she was. And everything between them—every hallway, every corridor, every room, an entire level—ceased to exist because it was in his way.

The body camera audio from the aftermath is mostly static. But there is a moment, mostly degraded, where you can hear humming. And underneath the humming, faintly, a voice. Hers. Saying "don't leave." And then his. One word.

We are not dealing with an entity that lives in the Backrooms.

We are dealing with the Backrooms. And it is in love.

God help us all.

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..”