~ Save the Dragons, ride a Targaryen ~

The shift came first. The unease settling into your stomach, your hand hovering over the phone as the bedsheets shrugged down your body. The other side, his side, was empty, cool and dull where it once would have left you kicking off the covers from your legs. An annoyed groan coming from being shoved too far into the pillow. How you missed that noise.

Your fingers wrapped the cord with a desperate hesitation. Push and pull back before you finally plucked the courage to press it to your ear.

“So sorry for the late call. But you were the only contact.” A man’s voice comes through the speaker, tired and gruff, one you’d expect to hear from the movies. Like he was torn between duty and doing right and falling asleep where he sat.

“No.. it’s okay, what is it?” You spoke quickly, stuttering it out as sleep clings to your eyes, falling away every second the anxiety crept in.

The officer droned on, and from consistent lack of sleep and your cheek shoved hovering over the receiver, you’d hardly listened. You waited for words, something to make your ears prick up. And it came, slowly.

“There’s no simple way to put this..”

The breath caught in your throat, hitching and drafting in the cold. You didn’t say anything, you couldn’t, your heart thumped too loud in your chest and ears to do anything other than breathe. This was news. It could be anything, it could be bad, it could be—

“We’ve got someone you might want to talk to.”

A sound escaped your mouth, about to speak, about to ask, pushing yourself up onto your one arm.

“Miss it’s—“ Suddenly, his voice stopped. The other end crackling with static before settling to an anticipatory silence. And that’s when it came, tired and shaky, and all him.

“Hey baby, it’s Bobby..”

The phone suddenly weighed a ton, and it shook in your hand. You hadn’t finished what you were even about to say, the way you felt the sob erupt in your throat, before you sprung out of bed. It dropped back onto the nightstand with a clatter and you didn’t pick it back up. In fact you didn’t pick up anything. Only a hoodie that lay on the chair, his, no car keys.

He came back to you in arms of police. Slumped on a bench in a hallway after questioning in a dimly lit corridor with his hands in his lap. The hoodie they gave him was different to his own, the clothes he’d worn the morning he’d disappeared were gone. They stitched his face in two places, one across his nose, the other at his jaw, and bruises littered in other place, his hands twitching and feet tapping impatiently.

Bobby didn’t have time to speak, your had flung your arms around him as soon as you met eyes around the corner. He embraced you tighter, arms circling around your waist, and a hand holding your head into his neck. He felt thinner, his body sagging against yours as he fell into it. Your tears stained his shoulder, and his own fell into your hair, soft sobs wracking your bodies.

“God I’ve missed you..”

“Yeah, no kidding..” You mumbled through your tears, offering what smile could reach your face. Your fingers finding their way over his face as his does yours, taking each other in with a disbelief that makes your eyes grow wide.

No one else had been accounted for. Clark, Kat, even a mention of Clark’s therapist, Mary that he’d mentioned to you once on one of his drunken rants. The time he had shouted at you and Bobby to get out of the store far before closing time. That was months ago, weeks before they all had even gone missing. But you didn’t leave time to question it, and neither did the detective standing in the doorway.

He sent you both away with a curt nod, and a careful order to get him some rest and ‘take good care of him, he looks pretty banged up’. And he does, he looks like he’s been through hell. His face paled and sunken in, eyes dark around the edges, but his body is warm against you, gentle.

And he didn’t let go all the way home, didn’t even stop looking at you. His hand threaded through yours over the gearstick as you drove, the last hours of night falling around you.

He was here, he was home..

—

“You might want to slow down..”

“Mmhm.. no way.” His spoon scrapes the bowl with a screech and he shovels another spoonful of cheerios into his mouth. He eats the way a dog would. Shameless and happily. Though he’s never been much for manners.

Bobby, always in a rush. And he does it in a way that almost makes you forgive him on the spot. Flashing that soft grin with a mouthful you, and that twinkle in his eyes.

You hadn’t asked him what he ate there, where he was, and he didn’t tell you. He only began to speak of some of it in detail, the things he could remember, or rather the things he could put into words, after days.

But there’s blips in his memory. things that don’t add up.

There were walls, and doors. An endless place where nothing made sense, and he wasn’t alone. The thoughts you conjure up look like something from someone on a bad acid trip, and for a while you wonder if it was. If someone laced some of his pot and he took off. But the look in his eyes says something different.

The look says others were involved, says that the evidence is all there, but even that couldn’t account for what happened. It’s real. And whatever, wherever he’s been, he doesn’t want to relive any of it.

You’ve seen it sometimes in mirrors and reflections. Where he passed by the bay window and stares too long in the bathroom. His eye, his body. It’s no different to how it’s always been, save for the bruises. But there’s the same slouch in his frame and swagger in his hips. But he pauses.

Almost inhumanly, like when someone forgets what they doing and have to counteract and rethink. But it’s more than that with him you notice, it’s like he’s recalibrating, like how a machine would.

Shut down, start again, think it over, and carry on.

It starts with small things. And then he becomes hyper fixated on you, and how you hurt.

He notices you flinch when you burn your hand on the stove. It’s nothing, just a quick sting, a sharp breath you barely mean to take back.

But Bobby sees it like it’s an emergency.

His eyes track your hand immediately, “That hurt.”

You shrug it off, turning to face him, “It’s fine, it’s just—”

“It shouldn’t be.”

The way he says it isn’t angry, but it’s final.

From then on, he watches. Not constantly, obviously, but it’s enough that you feel it. Like everything around you is learning you, like he is.

The next time you cut your finger, he’s already there before you even register it. He takes your hand gently, like he’s afraid of pressure itself.

“You don’t need this,” he says.

You blink. “Need what?”

“This.” He turns your hand slightly, studying the tiny line of red like it’s an error in something perfect. “Getting hurt and just… accepting it.”

You let out a breath. “Bobby, people get small cuts all the time.” His gaze lifts to yours.

It’s flat again. Focused.

“But why should you? Why should any of us?”

There it is again, that wrong kind of logic. His voice gets breathy then, almost like he’s about to break, tears under the laughter that comes from his mouth.

You try to laugh it off, try to pull your finger back, but he holds it in his, “Because that’s life.”

He tilts his head slightly, like the word “life” doesn’t translate correctly anymore.

“You had to adapt in there.. just to survive. It became everything.”

His thumb brushes just above the cut, small droplets beading with sting down your skin and you wince.

“And now you don’t have to adapt anymore.”

Your words register, but he doesn’t answer to them. Because it’s true, he doesn’t. Whatever that seems to mean.

“I’d take it away if I could.”

You go still.

“What do you mean?”

His eyes don’t move from your skin, and it tells you what he doesn’t say.

Your hurt, I’d take it all away if I could. I don’t know how, it doesn’t make sense, but I’d try. I’d try it all for you. I’d make being here count.

That lands wrong in your chest.

“Bobby… no. That’s not how it works.”

He finally looks up again.

And there’s something almost offended there now. Not at you, but at the idea that he can’t do that, that his brain is working far too fast for his thinking.

“I can take it away.. let me take it away for you baby.”

His hand raises to your cheek, your finger still clutched in his other, drawn right close to his face. It’s like it had something to give, and it’s almost him, it’s so close to being. It’s rushed and soft and careful, and it doesn’t know where to land. A finger slides through your hair, your breathing sharp as your finger presses to his lips, leaving a trail of blood.

“I’m better.”

The words crack strangely, and he’s repeating something he needs to believe.

For a second something flickers across his face. Confusion like grief, a fracture opening beneath the surface that leaves his smile appearing and disappearing in the same breath.

“I’m better,” he says again, quieter this time.

And God, part of him seems almost devastated by it.

Because whatever happened to him, whatever was taken apart and put back together wrong, it left one thing untouched.

You.

His eyes search your face with an intensity that makes your chest tighten.

You know that look.

Bobby used to look at you like that when he was in love. His jaw ticking and eyes blinking carefully. Now he looks at you like you’re the only thing keeping him anchored.

Like if he can just fix enough of the world around you, maybe the pieces inside him will stop rattling. Because he tries to silence it, he wants to so bad, he wants to take away every memory from that fucked up place. But he just.. can’t.

He leans closer, voice lowering, almost intimate

“I can make it better for you too.”

Your hand stays in his, threading through his fingers. But you realise, distantly, that this isn’t relief breaking through him.

It’s obsession.

Every time you wince, every time you get tired, every tiny hurt catches his attention and never quite lets it go. He circles back to them hours later. Days later. Asking if it still aches. If it’s gone. If he can help.

As if he’s collecting evidence, as if loving you has become tangled up with fixing.

And somewhere inside that fractured mind he’s decided that if you’re safe, if you’re comfortable, if nothing ever hurts you again, then maybe all of this was worth it.

Because that's when it dawns on you further. He hasn't let go since he came back. Not once. And now the way he holds you feels less like reassurance..

But it's still him. It's still Bobby, yours. And he reminds you of it. He reiterates it over and over everytime he sees the change in your eyes.

Because he does, he notices everything. The flicker of uncertainty, the gentle blow of your pupil with everything you can't name, the wanting, the longing. The fact he knows he's been missing for months and he left you alone, and that he is so sorry baby..

But he's here now. And he's good, great even, and he can prove it, he swears up and down that he can.

He just wants you.

And it’s not that you don’t. You do. You feel the want in every tug in your bones, every brush of his hand and breath at your ear. He’s been gone too long, the apartment empty and wrong. Now somehow it feels whole again. It’s sharper now, but hungry in all the ways it ever has been. When his teeth graze your throat and hands slide down your sides. They dig in. Searching, groping at the flesh, and his breathing is so ragged it consumes you.

You pull away. It’s instinct, it’s not want. Something creeping inside of you tells you it in harsh pangs in your gut.

He lets you, resting back into the kitchen counter, hands bracing there as he watches. His eyes follow you as you stand there, motionless and thinking. Bobby can’t read your mind, no amount of burning his gaze into your skull can do that, but the weight of it undoes you.

“I think you need rest..”

He just nods and lets you again. Allows you to lead him, and to take the first few steps as you turn away from him before he pushes mindlessly off of the counter. after you.

The bed is warm with both of you in it, the sheets pulled tight over your bodies in the first bit of normality you’ve both allowed yourself. He stills, splaying out on his back with one arm tucked behind his head in the pillows. You half expected him to fumble with his camera, mess about with it and keep the red light blinking for hours. Like he always has. But he doesn’t. Instead, his breathing evens out, an unusual slow.

But you curl around him anyway. He’s only just gotten home, the rest will come with time. For now your just thankful he’s even here, thankful for the fact he holds you even tighter, and you can hear the stuttering of his heartbeat in his chest, so calming that you surrender to it. The beating in your ears is a lull, its safety, its home. And he’s home. The tears almost fall again, welling at your eyes as you force them shut with a sting.

You don’t want to unnerve him, not after everything he’s been through. He deserves normalcy, and time, and this is it. So you push it down, swallowing it sharply until you succumb to sleep, fingers clutching tightly just to reassure yourself he’s there.

But Bobby hears it, the bobbing of your throat as you hold everything back. He doesn’t say anything, he knows better than to push. Because that’s it, he already knows.

He dreamt every space of time in there wondering, hoping, driving himself crazy just with the hope that he’d be in your arms again, and he is. He can’t seem to cry, even though he feels he could, but it claws deep in his chest, right where you lay, an empty void.

One they told him would be normal. That it’s common in his circumstances to feel an emptiness, a reintegration with society, particularly without knowing where, how and why can be difficult. It will be. But there was no telling how much.

Because where he went wasn’t on some crazy bender, it wasn’t a break from reality like the “kids these days and their down sides of smoking too much pot”. Where he went wasn’t Santa Clara. Where he went wasn’t anywhere at all, but he’d been there.

A place one you’ve been, you don’t truly leave.

The world around just seems surreal, like peeling back the chipped paint and cracked sidewalks would reveal everything. And maybe it could, after all it’s nothingness he fell into. His mind drifts as he stares up at the ceiling, fingers softly soothing at your back. He thinks of Clark, and Kat, and whoever else might have ever found that place. He wonders if they ever got out, or if the screams he heard were real, if the blood that caught under his nails and the dirt that sifted over his clothes were by his hands.

There’s no telling. But these hands, they hold you, that’s all he can think of. And they continue to rub at your back and comb through your hair. And because of it, somehow, some part of him feels together, and he’s able to for once close his eyes and feel sleep ways over him.

—

You try to ignore his words, the odd things they come out of his mouth, the things he mouths to himself when he thinks no one is looking.

But you can’t help it, it’s everywhere.

The first few days, he bounces back fast. He’s himself, and you’re certain he is. He’s bright and smiley, flashing you that grin even where it pulls at the stitches across his nose and chin. His hand folds into yours, threading through your fingers and curling at your knuckles and the kiss he pressed to your lips is tender.

But he has moments. Blips in his memory, like when he tells the stories of what he saw in there, he becomes jittery and lit of place.

You reassure him. You try. The store has been closed for further investigation, yellow banded tape crossed over every window and door. As if hadn’t cautioned out customers before, but that was the last place, the place where he disappeared. Even after all the pointing and the answers to the questions, he gives the detectives a direction, a complete map of what he saw. But they turn a blind eye, they don’t even look.

They just pave over the whole thing. Some even look at him likes he’s gone crazy.

You went through a wall?

Not through the wall, it’s.. listen, it’s a door. I don’t know how it works, but Clark, he showed me. It’s literally downstairs, the lower level I can show you.

Okay, that’s enough kid..

He patted him on the back, turning the pair of you away. They’d only called him back into questioning just to get a better idea, thinking that sitting down and retracing steps would work better than forcing him to speak the night he ran into the station.

Bobby never looked so angry, so ready to jump if you didn’t have your arm around you. He knows how it sounds, how stupid and crazy it sounds, and it really does. But he was there, he did go through the wall, and he didn’t come back until he found himself back months later. And that was only luck.

You watch him carefully. All the things he does. The checking, the overcompensating.. The way he wants to break back into the place, to show you everything on the camcorder, everything he picked up and that the police don’t want to hear. But how can he, because everytime he looks your way, the way he glances at you just to ask.

You don’t think I’m crazy do you?

—

The light reaches you before you can barely open your eyes all the way, rubbing them just to blink through the weariness. The bed dipped earlier but you thought nothing of it, just the steady warmth returning until it didn’t. You could hear him in the bathroom for a while, stepping back into the room with a creak in the floorboards, and he stopped for a moment. Watching.

But he didn’t come back to bed. And after a while, your body already wired, it kept you awake.

The static flickers on the tv, a dark greyish blue consuming the room.

His back faces you, his legs pressed over his knees from where he sits on the floor. Nothing plays on the video, just the grainy black and white shuffling over and over again with the noise over the top. Your steps reach the back of the couch, squinting just to see him properly.

“You scared of me now?” His speaks through the dark almost expectantly.

“Bobby what are you doing?”

“Answer me..”

“No I’m not.. why..” You answer gently.

“Then why’d you pull away.”

The shadow of his nose turns toward the light, golden strands of hair slipping into his eyes, leaving you out of view. But not unseen.

His gaze finds you anyway.

“When did I—”

“The other night. In the kitchen.”

Silence comes then, and his jaw works, chewing the inside of his cheek with everything pent up.

Like he’s chewing on something he doesn’t know how to swallow.

“You remember that?”

The question comes out quieter than you expect, but it’s not defensive, part of it is hopeful, part of it hungry.

You nod, only once and Bobby exhales through his nose. For a second his shoulders loosen, as if something had been handed back. Reassurance.

“You stayed.”

Your stomach twists. His voice seems smaller, shaky where he can’t seem to fully look at you, but he tries.

“Of course I stayed.”

His eyes flick over your face. Searching and searching. He’s looking for the moment you’ll take the words back, that you’ll call him crazy like the rest of them and leave him. But you don’t. And part of him knows that.

And he can’t let go of that, he never could before, and he wasn’t going to now. So he seizes it, rising for his feet in barely a blink and he’s in front of you. The static still mumbles on the tv, but it just shadows you both.

A hand clamps harsh around your waist, moving you in his grip to face him. His face is wet with tears, twinkling in the light where they remain following you.

“Bobby..?” You call out to him softly and he only presses into you.

“Shh.. it’s okay,” His breath hits your neck, breathless and snarling, but his face hardly moves. Your fingers brace around the counter he backs you both up into, his thumbs rubbing circles at your flesh where you don’t move away. You don’t pull away. You can’t and you don’t want to. But you feel the shift.

“I want you.”

His hand curls at the back of your back, backing you both into the edge of the couch, your legs hitting it with a thump. His mouth slides down to your ear, shaking you into his hold, pressing himself, his aching need into you. The motion makes you gasp, lips parting and he catches them, messy and wet with his own mouth.

“I want you to be mine again..” He mumbles against your lips, rolling the plumpness between his teeth.

“Bobby I’am yours..” His face comes into full view then, patterned by the moonlight breaking through the blinds.

“You promise ?”

His head falls back, body contorting around you, rocking back just to get a better look at you.

In this light, his canines just look that bit sharper, longer, glinting in the crackle of the tv set. The whites of his eyes keel over and roll back as they take you in, pupils blown in a black that covers the iris completely.

You don’t question it, something tells you not to. Some part of it is alluring, drawing you in like a dangerous honey, and you nod softly.

And that’s all he takes. In every way he can, in every way Bobby does. He collides. It’s slow but it’s desperate, his mouth consumes yours skillfully, tongue licking into yours as his hand circles to the back of your head.

“All mine.. just mine.”

He kisses you like that until your back hits the wall and your legs stumble, just so thy he can catch you into his arms. He wraps them around his waist, carrying you all the way, shedding your sleep shirt over your head and tossing it to the floor. There is an ache in the way he takes his time, gripping and tugging at every bit of flesh, kicking the door open with a careless groan.

You drop onto the bed with a huff, arms splaying out just for a moment until he’s on you again. His knees rise over your hips, squeezing you from the sides, caging you in.

His face goes blank where it drapes at your neck. Blue eyes faded to nothing but desire and primal hunger. And need. The primal urge is all too much, it consumes him, lights a fire deep in his belly and he knows in every shiver that creeps his spine, he has to have you. His hands hook around the waistband of your shorts, shrugging them off in one quick motion along with your panties, sliding down the thin fabric down your legs.

Then it’s all mess and warmth, the steady descent of him drowning in you, giving in to what he’s spent so long thinking of, dreaming of.

The sensation coasts down your body in waves, left by open mouthed kisses sucked over your skin. His lips press sweetly before they part, biting down roughly, catching you in his arms before you can pull back. The wince wracks your whole body, shivering under his touch as his fingers dig into the flesh of your navel, following the arch of your hips. It chases the feeling against you, the hard rip of teeth slicing into your skin, drawing red marks that bruise underneath it.

The one at your thigh drips languidly, acrid and tacky in thin droplets. Blood, your blood. And it’s his tongue that smoothes over it, soothing the wound where it opens, tears pricking your eyes where you become entirely undone. Your eyelids flutter, hands fisting the sheets around you and whatever else you can grab at.

He traces down where the trail follows, down across your thigh where the blood smears, down over the mound of your pussy where it mixes with your arousal, slick and dripping in your heat.

Bobby takes one longing look, one dark one shooting straight between your legs where you can see him. His touch is reverent, his mouth is hot right where you ache, and his eyes are completely blown black. Animalistic.

He delves in shamelessly, drinking you down with a long, flat suck through your folds, tongue dragging along your hole and circling at your clit.

“Taste s’good..”

He laps at you mercilessly, loud and unclean, claiming in a way that only comes from longing, or in Bobby’s case, devotion. His nose drags across your swollen clit, the skin rippling where you shake and tremble but he doesn’t let up. He devours you. Hands curl underneath you, tugging your further down onto him than even possible from the flesh of tour ass, your thighs fallen limp and curled over his back, the taut muscle flexing where he eagerly fucks you with his tongue.

His mouth closes over your pussy, rising just to catch where he sucks down hard on your clit, as it pulses and clenched around nothing.

“Good girl, so needy for it..” Wet muscle works its way into your hole, delving and lapping, feeling for where your moans pitch highest, working you there until you come undone. And you do. In hot pulses of pleasure that sift through your body, leaving your fingers tangled into his hair, holding and gripping as you rock yourself through his high. His tongue doesn’t relent, and neither does he, simply lets you chase the high until you’re dripping down his chin, sweet wetness that he slurps back into his mouth with a dark grin.

You whine out his name, eyes fluttering closed as your head lulls back onto the mattress. Something snaps again in him, harder this time, and unrestrained. One that leaves his fingers pinned around your wrists, shrugging the rest of his jeans down right to his knees.

“Open up your eyes.. look at me.”

Slender fingers cup your jaw, the other spreading your legs wider, thighs parting so he settles between them. He frees himself and his cock is dripping, twitching from where it sits so hard, an aching red and leaking from its tip. The sight makes you salivate, drenching the back of your throat near as much as your thighs.

“There she is..”

His hand wraps around it once, fisting it in a heavy pump that makes him groan, his throat bobbing as he rises back over you. The muscle of his biceps tick as they frame you, laying right beside your head, fingers flexing out to pat the strands of your hair. A delicate softness for all the depraved things he wants to do, that he’s compelled to do to you.

The tip of nose brushes your cheek, breath stuttering where he slides his hardness through your slick folds, resting himself with short thrusts on your pussy. The whine catches in your chest, your breaths mingling, and he looks down at you, and it takes a few blinks for you to notice. He’s really looking. Committing you to memory as if he’s seeing you for the first time all over again, his head tilts, only slightly, studying you once over.

His mouth claims your own, lips shoving into yours in a biting kiss, and then he gives in. He rolls his hips back to punch them into you, nestling right deep where you take all of him at once, stretching you deliciously to the limit.

“Oh, fuck..”

You gasp into his mouth, breath mingled with his own as his eyes squeeze shut, cursing at the clenching of your pussy around him, sucking him in greedily.

“I know, I know.. So good for me..” He rocks into you then, silencing your whines with his mouth, slipping his tongue so deep whatever is left of your faded mind swears it hits the back of your throat. His hips grind and ride over you until it punches deeper and consumes you.

“My angel, my girl..”

His cock drags inside of you, pounding over and over again until the breath is stolen from your lungs, constricted by his arm around your neck and the sheer weight of him pressing into you. biting into the back of your neck. Sweat coats your bodies, a sheen of arousal that grows hotter between you, beckoning him more, to give you more, to never leave your side again. And he vows it, pledges it into your body with his own.

Just like he won’t let you go.

His teeth bare sink into flesh without thinking, settling at the curve at of your jugular, not enough to tear, but enough to feel the pinch constrict. The tears fall over your cheeks, pattering in droplets right into where his mouth sits on your skin. He licks them away steadily right with the flick of his tongue, salt and sweat coating his lips with every other part of you that he’s collecting.

“Come on that’s it.. you got another one f’me yeah?” He rasps darkly, smirk pulling where his teeth graze your ear, smug and merciless.

Your whines keen into the sheets, shoved with a gasp every time he tugs you back onto him, mouth roaming relentlessly, restlessly where he can’t get enough of you. The feeling is too much, not enough, it’s burning hot where your skin slides together, his hips cracking into the curve of your ass just to drag further into your sopping pussy.

Your tits bounce with the force of his grinding, Bobby’s fingers pinching around to cup them, face pressing further down your body, curling over you. He growls low and guttural, suckling over every patch of skin he can find, “Shit.. take it baby, take all of me," His hands roam, scooping at the back of your thighs where they fall. He feels you falter, your thighs twitching and shaking, and he snags them, squeezing them as he shoves them up to your chest as he rises, moving you closer into him.

“Bobby.. fuck—“

He ruts into you at a pitiless pace, fingers pinching tight as they curl around your knees and legs, snapping right into your wet heat, and the whole of your body tightens. His thumb, or his fingers, you can’t tell, swipe over your throbbing clit, already too much and he circles, thumbing it in a rhythm that sends you over the edge. Your body leans forward, shooting up into him with a sharp cry of his name, heat bursting through your body, right deep where he kisses your cervix and all the way into your the tips of your toes.

Your pussy flutters around him, and the pulse is dizzying. He stutters, staggering where he tries to keep himself upright, fucking you through your high as it filters out, your hips spasming at the touch. He thrusts sloppily into you, slowly grinding down, rolling properly into you until he is collapsing.

He wants to keep you like this, to fill you, to do it over and over again until neither of you can take it. It burns in his chest, with every aching drag of his cock inside of you, and every loud ring of your moans in his ears.

“That’s it, that’s my girl..” His groan is hoarse, breaking at the edges where it’s rough, bordering on a whine as he shoves his face into your neck. His breath brushes your damp skin, inhaling your scent heavily, still suffering inside of you.

“Fuck I’ll..” His chest falls over yours, unhooking your legs carefully to lay down at his dies, “I’ll give you everything..” He punctuates with one last pump, stilling as his lips purse against you.

Neither of you seem to disconnect from one another, his arms releasing you just enough to curl around the back of you. The sleep that was lost before gently intoxicating you both in your bliss. He kisses at the back of your neck and your shoulder, the sheets swarmed over you and his arm that hands over your waist.

“I love you..”

Are the only words you hear, over and over again as he whispers them into your ear. You mumble it back softly with your eyes closed, falling back into the warm wall of his chest.

And only then does he drift, soothed at your side, where he belongs. Where he’s home.

—

Part of him wants back there, and it’s not conscious, it’s the twitch in his sleep and the tug in his peripheral. Part of him wants to take you with him. But he can’t, he won’t subject you to that, nor even to change it. So he holds you tighter, pulls you closer.

It’s more calculated than it once was, but it’s just as warm, inviting, sometimes too much. That you have to remind yourself to be careful, that he’s hurting and it’s going to take time.

But some things don’t change, they don’t change at all.

He was protective over it at first, scrolling through tape after tape just to jam up the roll so none of it could be seen again. Only the old ones came through, the soft memories, not the evidence. Screams and questions were replaced with gentle laughter and cursing when he’d drop it from zooming too close.

The camera sits in your hands, heavy and jarring. The noise whirrs sharply, echoing in the thin halls of your shared apartment, and you go to cover it, even though he’s out. You sent him on a grocery store run minutes ago, just before he slipped you a kiss through the screen door.

You flicker through every video. You wanted to see for yourself, to hear him out and find the evidence that you believe from him. But there’s nothing, and you go to put it down. You’re so close to. But then it comes up, flashing blue and broken before the colours come through.

It’s titled from back then. A week or so only after he went missing. Your eyes squint at the small screen just to get a better view, and it shakes you.

It’s Bobby. Yellow walls are tall behind him, like old wallpaper you’d find in an office, more like an abandoned one. The lights flicker and buzz around him, but it’s dark, only half of his face showing up.

“Okay. I’m not sure what this place is.. it’s fucked up. It took Kat, I don’t where where the fuck Clark is. I haven’t seen either of them.. But.. this thing, whatever it is keeps coming through. It’s followed me for days.. I don’t get it, it’s like it’s trying to be me. It mimics, and it.. changes.” A sharp crackle fills the audio, and all you can see is his face. It’s scared, panicked even, holding the camera with two hands just to keep it in hand.

You go to turn it off, clapping it in your hands just to get it to work again, but all you can hear is the buzzing, his voice following after his mouth moves.

“.. not me..”

The clip jumps, scratching along with the distortion of the video. Bobby’s face phases out, a loud beeping sound coming from the tape, until he comes back into view.

He doesn’t look panicked this time, in fact his face is relaxed, calm with an uneasy curve at his lips. He’s smiling. Not wide, but hopeful, soft like he’s looking right through the lens and at you. The sound doesn’t come through until the video fades, static covering the screen and a muffled,

“But I’m coming home baby.”