Hey ho, it's Bo

You hum weakly, letting your head rest back on the pillows as the smell of weed and Bobby’s cologne filled your head. Your eyes stray to the fan overhead, the blades pass by slowly as you count the seconds while Bobby slowly kisses his way up your legs, easing them over his shoulders.

“You with me?” He pauses above your covered cunt, taking a slow drag from the blunt before parting his lips and letting the hot smoke breeze over the wet fabric of your panties, making you jolt.

“Mm- Y-yeah,” you stutter over the fuzziness in your brain that comes from the pleasant buzz of cannabis. Bobby’s hand grasps yours, lifting the camera with a practiced ease.

“Keep me in focus.” The words are murmured into the skin below your belly button, igniting that familiar fire in your navel and causing the hairs on your neck to stand up.

At your nod, Bobby takes another hit of the blunt before leaning down. His lips meet the puffy folds of your cunt and with a slow exhale, the smoke glazes over your panties again. It’s punctuated by a slow lick that spreads the wet patch on your panties.

His nose nudges your clit and he chuckles at the pleasured noise that drips from your lips. The soft buzz of the camera lets him know your zooming in, soaking in the heated, fuzzy look in his eyes and the way he’s sitting open-mouthed against your pussy.

The smell of your arousal is much stronger when he’s this close. And it mixes with the smell of weed in a way that Bobby salivates. His impatience starts bleeding through his high mind and finally, Bobby hooks a finger through the crotch of your panties, tugging them to the side to reveal your dripping folds.

It’s a pretty sight, the puff of your folds, the glistening slick of arousal, the choked sound you make as the cold air hits your exposed pussy. He almost wishes he had the camcorder with him so he could immortalize this forever.

Bobby takes one more slow drag from the blunt, eyes meeting yours over the camera. With a nip to the meat of your inner thigh, Bobby slips the blunt into your hand, right in the small gap between your index and middle finger. Ash falls off the edge of it, scattering over your skin.

Your wince turns into a choked moan when Bobby’s mouth finally greets your pussy. His tongue is heavy with saliva and heat as he greedily tastes you for all your worth. He swaps between suckling at your clit and slipping his tongue between your folds. It’s a vicious cycle that leaves you feeling floaty and loose.

You legs give weak twitches when Bobby’s tongue glazes over your clit, tightening around his head to bring him closer when he pulls away to breathe. The camcorder shakes in your hands and Bobby notices.

He pinches your thigh as he withdraws from you slightly. “C’mon baby, keep the camera still. Like I showed you.” He licks his lips, groaning at the sweet taste of you as he watches you readjust the camera. When he’s satisfied with the angle, he lays back down, kissing your clit sweetly like he was rewarding you.

“Fuck-” You moan as he slips his tongue back into your folds, his calloused thumb doing figure eights over your clit as his other hand massages your thigh.

The dual stimulation continues and he gets lost in it, eyes shutting as he continues to make out with your pussy. At a certain point your hips start grinding against his face and hand, desperately chasing that high that you’ve been needing since Bobby proposed this idea.

His thumb leaves your clit, his index and middle finger accompanying his tongue in your aching walls. Bobby effectively swapped places with his mouth and fingers, lapping at your clit as his fingers leisurely take you apart from the inside out. Every stroke and curl makes your breath hitch and whine as you do your best to keep the camcorder stable.

“Bobby- I’m gonna-” You keen, lips parting for a stilted moan as his fingers speed up. The strokes turn quicker, his saliva drips down your clit and spills into your hole.

He mumbles something against your overstimulated bundle of nerves, tongue flattening against it as he curls his fingers against that spongy spot in your velvety walls. He murmurs vague pieces of praise that leaves your feet curling and back arching as you cum with a loud whine.

Bobby withdraws his fingers, licking them clean before he leans back in to lick you clean. Sweat drips down your back and your thighs are sticky with cum and spit. You vaguely register Bobby’s warm hands taking the camcorder from you, his spit soaked fingers snatching the blunt from you.

He places the blunt in his lips, freeing his hand to massage your ass slowly. Bringing you down from your high.

Blinking quickly, your flushed cheeks are hot to the touch and your eyes are fogged from the weed and now that pretty post orgasmic glaze. You register Bobby more clearly now, his blue eyes and dirty blonde hair. He’s sat up, your thighs resting at his hips. He cradles the camera in his other hand but he watches you patiently.

When a bit more clarity hits your eyes, he smiles, taking the blunt out of his mouth and leaning forward to press a soft kiss to your lips. The taste of your cum sits on his tongue as he moans against you, smoke filling both of your mouths as he hips twitching as he grinds his dick against your pussy. The cloth drags on your overstimulated clit and you whine agaisnt Bobby’s lips as he pulls away.

It’s not just the thrill of power—though he couldn’t deny how much he enjoyed that too. No, it’s deeper, more primal, a fascination with the fragile line between trust and surrender.

Ever since you and Toby started this twisted little relationship, he’s found himself drawn to those moments when you’re at your most exposed, your defenses crumbling under his touch.

In sex, it’s intoxicating. The way your body yields to him, your breaths coming in ragged gasps as he pins your wrists above your head, his tics jerking his shoulders in erratic rhythms that only heighten the unpredictability. You arch into him, eyes wide and pleading, trusting him not to break you—even though you both know he could, if the urge struck. 

Day to day, it’s subtler but no less addictive. The way you lean into his side during quiet evenings in the decrepit cabin you share, your head on his shoulder as rain patters against the warped windows. Or how you let him wrap his arms around you from behind while you’re cooking, your laughter soft and unguarded when his fingers twitch involuntarily against your waist. 

“T-Toby, that tickles,” you might murmur, turning to press a kiss to his scarred cheek, oblivious to the storm raging in his thoughts—the urge to hold you tighter, to claim every inch of that trust.

But his favorite thing? 

God, it’s when you’re asleep. 

Curled up next to him in the narrow bed, your chest rising and falling in slow, even waves, so utterly at peace. The moonlight filters through the cracks in the blinds, casting silver shadows over your skin, highlighting the curve of your hip under the thin sheet, the way your lips part just slightly as if whispering secrets to the dark. 

You’re so vulnerable then, aren’t you? Trusting him completely to keep you safe in the dead of night, when the woods outside whisper threats and the monsters—real ones, like him—could so easily take advantage. Toby lies there, propped on one elbow, his dark eyes tracing every detail: the flutter of your eyelashes, the pulse at your throat, the way your fingers twitch in dreams he can only imagine.

He can’t help but watch you, his breath stuttering with each tic. Sometimes, he leans in closer, his hand hovering before gently brushing a strand of hair from your face. 

“S-so pretty,” he whispers to himself, voice cracking like static on an old radio. And then, because the pull is too strong, he kisses you—soft at first, a ghost of lips against your forehead, then trailing down to your neck, where he lingers, inhaling the warm scent of your skin. His touches grow bolder in these stolen hours—fingers skimming the hem of your shirt, slipping beneath to trace lazy circles over your stomach, feeling the heat of you, the softness that yields without resistance. 

You stir sometimes, a sleepy murmur escaping—“Toby?”—but you never fully wake, drifting back into oblivion, leaving him aching with the knowledge that you’re his to protect, to adore, to tear apart if he wants.

And that’s when it all really began.

It started innocently enough—or as innocent as things get in your world. One night, after a brutal mission left him wired and aching, Toby had stumbled back to the cabin late, the scent of blood and forest clinging to his hoodie. You were already asleep, curled under the blankets like a gift waiting to be unwrapped, your breaths soft and even. He hadn’t planned it, not really; he’d just meant to collapse beside you. 

But seeing you there, so trusting, so exposed… it ignited something feral. 

His hands had trembled as he peeled back the sheets, his shaky fingers tracing the curve of your thigh, dipping lower until he was between your legs, mouth watering at the thought.

You’d stirred only when his tongue delved in, lapping at you with desperate hunger, the taste of you pulling a guttural groan from his throat. Your eyes had fluttered open, hazy with sleep, finding him buried under the covers, his shoulders jerking as he devoured you, your panties snagged around your ankles. 

“T-Toby?” you’d murmured, voice scratchy and confused, but then understanding dawned, and you’d arched into him, fingers tangling in his messy hair. 

“Don’t stop… please.” He’d made you cum right there, your moans shrill and loud, until you were trembling and spent, pulling him up to kiss you fiercely.

From then on, it became his obsession—your obsession. Toby gets off so badly on it, the way your body responds even in sleep, pliant and warm, no barriers between you. 

He’d wait until you were deep under, drooling slightly on the pillow, your limbs heavy and relaxed, before sliding into you slowly, savoring every inch as you enveloped him without a word. The friction, the heat, the absolute surrender—it drove him wild, his hips snapping erratically as he fucked you into the mattress, whispers spilling from his lips like confessions. 

“S-so perfect… all m-mine…” And when you’d finally wake, eyes widening at the feel of his cock buried deep in your cunt, you’d cling to him immediately, legs wrapping around his waist, nails digging into his back as you gasped his name. 

“Yes, Toby—harder—fuck—” It was his favorite, that moment of transition from dream to reality, your trust turning into raw need.

You loved it just as much, encouraging him with sleepy smiles in the mornings after. 

“You can do it anytime, Toby,” you’d whisper, nuzzling into his neck during lazy afternoons. “Fuck me when I’m asleep all you want. I like waking up to you like that—feeling you already inside me. It’s so good.” 

It made him feel powerful, needed, in a way nothing else could. Sometimes he’d come home from missions in the dead of night, still buzzing with adrenaline, and head straight for your sleeping form. No words, just shedding his gear and diving under the sheets, his mouth on you before you could even register the intrusion. Your eyes would flutter open to the sight of the blanket tented over his head, his hands gripping your thighs as he licked and sucked, bringing you to a shuddering climax that blurred your vision terribly.

So, of course, something like this would happen to him.

“It’ll be alright, Toby,” you say softly, thumb brushing over his stubbled jaw. “EJ just needs some material for his study. He said it’s just a little medicine to make me sleep for a bit, and I’ll stay on his medical bed until it wears off. He’ll keep good watch, I promise.” Your voice is steady, but Toby’s fingers twitch against your hips, a nervous tic betraying the calm he was trying to exude.

“N-not sure I like this,” he mutters, his voice low and gravelly, punctuated by the occasional jerk of his shoulder. “Y-you, asleep, down there with h-him? What if somethin’ goes wrong?” His protectiveness wraps around you like a heavy blanket, warm but suffocating. 

Toby’s always been your shield, his hatchet a promise of safety in a world crawling with things that go bump in the night. Letting you out of his sight, especially in a place as the Slendermansion, feels like a betrayal of that unspoken vow.

“He’s your friend, Toby,” you remind him, pressing a kiss to the corner of his mouth, where the scar tissue pulls tight. “You trust him, don’t you? And besides, I’m the only true human around, so Jack was very eager.” 

It’s a gentle nudge, and though Toby’s jaw clenches, he nods reluctantly, his hand squeezing yours.

“F-fine,” he says, exhaling sharply. “But I’m comin’ with you. N-no way I’m lettin’ my ba-baby sleep in some creepy b-basement without me.” His resolve is unshakable, and you can’t help but smile.

The trek to the Slendermansion is quiet, the forest swallowing the crunch of your footsteps under a canopy of gnarled branches. Toby’s hand stays clasped around yours, his hatchet slung over his shoulder, its blade catching slivers of sunlight. The mansion looms ahead, a decaying monolith of cracked stone and shadowed windows, its presence oppressive yet all-too-familiar. You descend the creaking stairs to EJ’s basement abode, the air growing cooler, tinged with the sterile tang of antiseptic and rust.

Eyeless Jack waits in his makeshift lab, a cavernous space lit by flickering fluorescent bulbs. Stainless steel tables gleam under the light, littered with vials, syringes, and notebooks scrawled with cryptic notes. His eyeless mask tilts toward you as you enter, the black voids where eyes should be unnervingly blank, though his voice is calm, assertive. 

“Thanks for coming,” he says, his tone devoid of the menace his appearance suggests. “This won’t take long. I’m studying physiological responses under induced sleep—heart rate, blood pressure, neural activity. The sedative is mild, FDA-approved for short-term use. You’ll be out for about fourty-five minutes, and I’ll monitor everything from here.” He gestures to a medical bed in the center of the room, its white sheets crisp and uninviting.

You glance at Toby, who’s eyeing the setup with suspicion, his fingers twitching against the handle of his hatchet. “J-just data, huh?” he asks, voice sharp. “No weird s-stuff? You’re not cuttin’ her open or nothin’?”

Jack shuffles off his old mask, placing it onto his desk in the company of friends. He smirks, just enough to aggravate the boy. 

“No cutting, Toby. Just sensors and vitals. She’ll be safe, I swear.” He holds up a small syringe filled with a clear liquid, tapping it lightly to dispel air bubbles. “This is the sedative. It’s fast-acting but wears off quickly. She’ll sleep, I’ll collect my data, and she’ll wake up feeling rested.”

You squeeze Toby’s hand, stepping closer to the bed. “See? It’s fine. Just a quick nap, and you’ll be right here.” You climb onto the bed, the cold leather creaking beneath you, and Toby follows, perching on a stool nearby, his gaze darting between you and Jack.

“Alright,” Jack says, approaching with the syringe. “You’ll feel a small pinch, then it’s lights out for a little over half an hour.” The needle slides into your arm, a brief sting followed by a cool rush through your veins. 

Toby’s hand tightens around yours, his breathing uneven as he watches. “I-I’m right here, okay?” he whispers, his voice softer now, almost tender. “Not goin’ anywhere.”

The world begins to blur, your eyelids growing heavy as the sedative pulls you under.

Damn, that was fast. 

Jack’s voice fades into a distant hum, explaining something about monitors and baseline readings, but all you can focus on is Toby’s thumb stroking your knuckles, grounding you as you slip into the dark. 

The last thing you hear is his stuttered, “S-sleep tight, baby,” and then you’re gone.

—

Toby’s grip on your hand is tight enough to bruise, but he can’t help it. 

Your fingers are slack in his, warm and soft, the way they always are against his always cold ones. The fluorescent lights buzz overhead, too bright, too clean, and the air smells like bleach and metal and enough rust to make his stomach twist. Jack’s gloved fingers move over your skin, and every time those fingers brush your collarbone or the inside of your wrist, Toby’s shoulders jerk hard enough to rattle the stool he’s perched on.

“Easy,” Jack murmurs, not looking up from the electrode he’s pressing just above your chest. “Just a sensor. Heart rate, nothing invasive.”

Toby’s jaw clenches. “I know wh-what it is.” He doesn’t. “J-Just don’t linger.”

Jack’s face tilts—a silent acknowledgment—and his hands move faster. The beeping starts up, matching the rise and fall of your chest. Toby watches the line on the monitor like it’s a lifeline. Seventy-two beats per minute. Seventy-one. Seventy-three. Your pulse, alive and thumping.

Jack starts up an IV drip, and slides a blood-pressure cuff up your arm, velcro rasping. Toby’s free hand twitches toward the pocket knife tucked in his belt, then curls into a fist instead. 

He’s not gonna do anything reckless. Jack’s his friend. Jack swore. 

He has got to calm down.

But the sight of you laid out like this—shirt skewed up just enough to expose the soft skin of your stomach, legs slightly parted on the bed—makes something dark and hungry coil in his gut. Same as it does when he crawls into bed at 3 a.m., still reeking of dirt, and finds you drooling on the pillow, thighs warm and open under the sheets.

He remembers last week. Came in from a job, knuckles split, head buzzing. You’d been out cold, one arm flung above your head, mouth slack. He’d peeled your panties down with his teeth, buried his face between your legs before you even twitched. The way you’d woken up gasping, hips already rocking against his tongue, fingers scrabbling at his hair…

“Toby, fuck, don’t stop—”

But this isn’t the cabin. This isn’t his bed. This is Jack’s lab, and Jack’s watching your vitals like they’re a puzzle to solve, and Toby’s trying not to think about how easy it would be to slide his hand up your thigh right now, just to feel you clench around his fingers while you’re still gone.

“Toby.”

Jack’s voice cuts through the static in his head. The demon’s standing at the foot of the bed now, arms crossed. “Youre zoning out.”

Toby drags his eyes up. “I’m fine.”

“You look like you’re about to pass out. Calm down.” Jack nods at the monitor. “She’s stable. She’s dreaming, probably. See the REM?”

Toby glances at your face. Your eyelids flutter, just barely, and your lips part on a soft exhale. A thin line of drool glistens at the corner of your mouth. His cock twitches, traitorously hard against his thigh, and he shifts on the stool, hating how obvious it must be.

Jack notices—of course he does. “Fourty-five minutes,” he says, softer now. “I’ll have what I need. Then you can take her home. Alright?”

Toby’s throat works. “Yeah.”

The silence stretches, thick and humming with the monitors’ steady beeps. Toby’s thigh bounces under the stool, the hard line of his cock trapped against his zipper, impossible to ignore. Every time you shift—just a twitch of your hips, a soft, breathy sound that might be a dream—he feels it like a jolt straight to his groin. Your fingers flex in his grip, limp and trusting, and he squeezes back harder, knuckles whitening.

Jack’s head tilts. The demon doesn’t have eyes, but Toby feels the stare anyway. A low, amused exhale hisses through the demon’s teeth as takes several deep breaths of the air.

“Jesus, Toby. You’re stinking up the whole lab. I can smell your hormones from here.”

Toby’s shoulders jerk. “F-Fuck off.”

Jack chuckles, the sound wet and gravelly. “Relax, I’m kidding. But seriously, how many times have you two fucked while she’s out cold if you’re this horny watching her sleep. You’re practically vibrating.”

Toby’s jaw locks. He knows Jack meant it lightheartedly, but Toby was never very good at covering his true feelings. He doesn’t answer. Just stares at your mouth—parted, glossy with a thin line of drool—and remembers the way you’d whimpered last night when he’d pushed in slow, your body clenching around him before your brain caught up.

Jack groans, realizing. “Oh, you are a freak. Please tell me you’re not just feeling her up while she’s unconscious.”

Toby’s head snaps up. “S-She likes i-it.” The words come out sharp, defensive, but there’s pride in them too. “She a-asks for it, di-dipshit.”

Jack leans back against the counter, arms crossed. “Elaborate.”

Toby’s eyes flick to you and he swallows. 

“I-I mean, it’s not… n-not all the time,” he starts, voice cracking on the first syllable. His thumb keeps rubbing the same small circle over your pulse, grounding himself. “Just… som-sometimes. When I come in late. Or, uh… when s-she’s already out.”

Jack doesn’t move. Doesn’t laugh. Just waits.

Toby swallows. “She-she’ll be on her side, or… or her stomach. Mouth o-open. Little wet spot o-on the p-pillow.” His shoulders jerk once, hard. “I just… pull the sheet down. She’s n-not even wearing clothes ha-half the t-time.”

He risks a glance at Jack. The demon’s head is cocked now, listening like he’s taking mental notes.

“I’ll… touch her f-first. Just-just fingers. See if she’s…” He trails off, cheeks burning under the hood. “Wet… She always is. Even i-in her sleep. L-Like her body knows.”

Jack hums, low. “And then?”

Toby’s voice drops to a near-whisper, glaring. “Then I… I go d-down on her. Under the blanket. She-she makes these li-little noises. Just… dreaming. Her hips move on their o-own.” His stutter worsens, words tripping over each other. “I-I keep going ‘til s-she’s close. Then I… I slide i-in. She clenches around me b-before she even opens her uh-eyes.”

He stops. He can’t look at Jack now, just focuses at your face—peaceful, lips parted, a flush on your cheeks from the sedative.

“She wakes up needy,” he mutters. “Al-Always. Wraps her legs around m-me like she’s scared I’ll stop. Tells me—tells me not to. Every t-time.”

Silence. The monitors beep. Thirty minutes left.

Jack finally speaks, voice neutral. “And she remembers?”

Toby nods, jerky. “Y-Yeah. Says it’s like waking up i-inside a dream. That she feels m-me even when she’s not conscious. Likes it.”

He risks another look. Jack’s still, but there’s something in the set of his shoulders—fascination, maybe. Or recognition.

“Interesting,” Jack says quietly. “The body responding before the mind. Physical actions manifesting through brain matter.”

Toby’s grip tightens on your hand again. “Don’t… don’t make it weird.”

Jack huffs a laugh. “Too late for that.”

Jack’s boots scuff across the concrete as he crosses to the desk, the sound too loud in the humming quiet. Toby’s pulse is in his throat now, a frantic drum against his collar. He tries to think of anything else, but your soft exhale pulls him right back. Your lips part on a tiny, sleepy sound, and his cock jerks so hard he has to shift his hips to keep from groaning.

Jack scribbles something on his clipboard, reading the monitors, then pads back. He stops just outside Toby’s personal space, voice low.

“Fuck her.”

Toby’s up in a flash, stool clattering. “F-Fuck off,” he snarls, body jerking so violently his neck cracks. “You don’t g-get to—”

“Purely medical,” Jack cuts in, palms raised. “I want the spike in her limbic system when she climaxes under sedation. Arousal response without conscious filter. Thirty seconds of data, max. Then you take her home.”

Toby’s laugh is sharp, cracked. “You’re a f-fucking weirdo.” He’s already leaning over the bed, sliding one arm under your shoulders, the other under your knees. Your head lolls against his chest, warm and heavy, and the feel of you limp in his arms makes his stomach flip with something between panic and hunger.

Jack doesn’t move. “Can’t get weirder than you bragging about railing her unconscious, Toby. I keep my back turned. Won’t look. Just the readings and vitals. One orgasm. You walk out and I never mention it again.”

Toby freezes. Your hair brushes his neck, your breath fans warm across his collarbone. He can smell your shampoo, and the thought of sliding into you right here, with Jack ten feet away pretending not to listen, makes his vision blur at the edges.

He stands there a beat too long, arms full of you, heart hammering against your ribs.

Jack’s voice drops, a velvet rasp that makes Toby’s skin prickle. “Think about it, Toby. How good it’d feel to make her cum and she doesn’t even realize it. No waking up mid-thrust, no sleepy eyes blinking open to pull you closer. Just her body giving in.”

Toby’s breath hitches, your limp weight in his arms suddenly heavier, warmer. He can picture it too vividly: your thighs trembling under his hands, the slick heat of you pulling him deeper, your pulse spiking on the monitors as you shatter around him. A shiver races down his spine, electric and wrong, making his knees buckle just a fraction. Nervous sweat beads at his temples, his tics firing off in erratic pops of his joints.

“She’s always so fragile when you do it at home,” Jack presses, stepping closer, his eyeless voids swallowing the light. “You go gentle, don’t you? ‘Cause one wrong move and she’s waking up. But now? With this?” He nods at the IV drip in your arm. “She won’t wake. You could pin her down, fuck her raw—no holding back.”

Toby’s mind fractures. 

What would you want? The question loops, frantic. You’d laugh it off in the morning, maybe—cup his face, kiss the scar on his cheek, murmur, “Toby, baby, if it feels good, do it. I trust you.” Or you’d arch a brow, teasing, “You know I love waking up wrecked. Don’t stop on my account.” But this isn’t the cabin’s creaky bed, isn’t your shared sheets tangled with familiarity. This is here, with Jack’s gaze on the data, your vitals beeping erratically. His teeth grind together, molars aching, as the old permission echoes back. “You can do it anytime, Toby.”

Jack sees it—the crack in his armor, the way Toby’s arms tighten around you like he’s already imagining the leverage. The demon leans in, voice a conspiratorial purr. “Come on, Toby. Give her the kind of orgasm that brands her insides. The one where she squirts without knowing why. You know you’ve always wanted to push that far.”

Toby’s hips jerk involuntarily, a low groan clawing up his throat. Heat floods his groin, sticky and insistent—his cock leaking pre into the front of his jeans, soaking through the denim in a dark, shameful patch. He’s crumbling, vision tunneling to the curve of your neck, the flutter of your pulse. 

Twenty-seven minutes left. Fuck.

Jack opens his mouth, but Toby’s had enough..

“Shut. The fuck. Up.”

Jack’s jaw clicks shut.

Toby stares at you. Long. Too long. Your head lolls against his forearm, hair spilling over his skin like silk. Your lips are parted, breath warm and slow. His eyes trace every inch like he’s memorizing a map he’s already burned into his brain.

Then he looks at Jack. Hard. Dead in the mask.

“Nobody ever k-knows,” he grunts. “Not a word. Not a jo-joke. You keep your back turned. You don’t s-speak. You don’t look. You see t-the numbers, that’s it.”

Jack nods, slow. “Done.”

Toby’s chest heaves. One more beat. Two. He closes his eyes, jaw clenched so tight the scar pulls white. Then he moves.

He lays you back on the table with a gentleness that he reserves only for you, your body settling into the padded leather. He angles your hips toward him, one knee nudged between yours, your thigh brushing his. The sheet pools at your feet. Your shirt rides up, exposing the dip of your waist, the soft skin just above your shorts.

Jack turns and shuffles to his desk, sitting down on his chair, back facing the two of you.

Toby doesn’t look at him again.

Toby’s hands settle on your thighs, thumbs pressing into the soft inner flesh just above your knees. He spreads you open slowly, trying his best not to let you lay too uncomfortably. Your legs fall apart with no resistance, knees bending, hips tilting up toward him in unconscious invitation. A low, animal sound rumbles in his chest.

He steps in, knees nudging the table’s edge, and presses. The hard ridge of his cock, trapped behind denim, drags along the seam of your shorts. Heat blooms through the layers, and he can’t stop the shudder that rips up his spine. His hips roll forward once, testing, grinding the length of himself against the clothes. Fuck. You’re warm even through the fabric, and the friction is maddening.

“Sh-shit,” he breathes, barely a whisper. His fingers flex, digging into your thighs hard enough to leave pale prints that flush pink when he eases up. 

His hands slide upward, palms skating over the curve of your hips, thumbs hooking under the hem of your shirt. He pushes it higher, higher, until the fabric bunches beneath your breasts. Cool air kisses your stomach and goosebumps rise in its wake. Toby’s mouth waters. He leans down, forehead brushing your sternum, inhaling the scent of your skin. His tongue darts out, tasting the salt just below your ribs, and he has to bite back another groan.

He straightens just enough to watch your face. Your lashes flutter, your lips part on a soft, breathy sound that isn’t quite a moan but close. It goes straight to his cock. He grinds again, harder this time, the denim rasping against you, the pressure exquisite. Pre soaks through his boxers, sticky and hot, smearing against the inside of his jeans with every roll of his hips.

His fingers find the button of your shorts. They tremble—just once—before popping it open. He hooks his thumbs into the waistband and tugs, the fabric dragging over your hips, catching for a heartbeat on the swell of your ass before sliding lower. He has to lift you slightly, one arm sliding beneath your lower back, arching you up so he can peel the pants down your thighs. They pool at your ankles and he kicks them aside.

You’re bare to him now except for the thin scrap of panties, darkened at the center with arousal you don’t even know you’re giving. Toby’s breath stutters. He palms himself through his jeans, squeezing hard, trying to rein in the urge to rip everything off and bury himself to the hilt. Not yet. He wants to savor.

His hands return to your thighs, pushing them wider until the muscles tremble. He drops to his knees beside the table, eye-level with the soaked cotton. One thumb traces the edge of your panties, teasing the elastic, then slips beneath. 

The heat of you is staggering enough to make him smile. He drags the pad of his thumb up your slit, parting your folds, coating his finger in your slick. 

He looks up at your head turned slightly, cheek pressed to the padding, mouth lazily open. Another soft noise escapes you, dreamy, and Toby’s vision whites out at the edges. He presses the heel of his hand against his cock, grinding into his own touch, his hips jerking helplessly.

Jack’s chair creaks. A low, muffled grunt comes from across the room, followed by the shuffle of his palm dragging over the lower half of his face. The air is thick, drenched in the sour-sweet scent of your arousal and the heady, muskier note of Toby’s own need. It clings to the back of the throat like smoke, and he thinks he’ll choke on it.

Toby doesn’t look up, doesn’t care. His world has narrowed to the slick heat between your thighs, the way your skin flushes under his mouth, the soft, involuntary roll of your hips when he drags the flat of his tongue up your slit.

He hooks two fingers into the soaked crotch of your panties and tugs. The elastic snaps against your hip, then gives, and he bunches the fabric in his fist, holding it aside like a curtain. Cool air kisses your bare folds and you shiver, thighs twitching open another inch.

His first kiss lands on the tender inside of your thigh, teeth grazing, then soothing with a slow lick. He works inward, open-mouthed presses of lips and tongue mapping every inch of soft skin until he reaches your center. He exhales, hot and shaky, against your folds, and you make the smallest sound—a breathy ‘mmph’ that isn’t quite a moan but makes his cock throb so hard his vision blurs.

He licks you open, slow and filthy, tongue curling up to circle your clit with the same lazy rhythm he uses when you’re half-awake and clinging to his shoulders. Your body answers without thought—hips tilting, a tremor in your thighs, slick coating his chin. He keeps the pace gentle, even as his own need claws at his spine. His free hand drops to his lap, palming the rigid line of his cock through denim, squeezing in time with each swirl of his tongue.

Toby has never made it to fucking you without you waking up. He’s only ever gotten the tip in before you’re blinking awake and smiling lazily at him.

He loves it, he does.

But knowing that he’s about to fuck your cunt as hard as he wants—without you waking up—he can barely hold himself back.

Your clit swells under his attention, flushed and glistening. He sucks it softly, just enough pressure to make your breath hitch, then releases with a wet pop. Another slow lick, base to tip, savoring the taste of you just like he always does. Your fingers twitch against the padding, your head turns, cheek pressing deeper into the table, lips parted on a silent gasp—but you still don’t wake up.

Toby’s hips jerk forward, grinding into his own hand. Precome leaks steadily now, soaking through layers of fabric, making the slide of his palm slick. He groans against you, the vibration rumbling through your core, and your thighs try to close on reflex, but he wedges his shoulders between them, keeping you spread.

He could stay here forever. Could lick you open until the sedative wore off and you woke up mid-orgasm, confused and dripping and begging. But the monitors beep faster now, your heart rate climbing, brain waves flickering into theta, and Jack’s pen is scribbling just as fast.

Toby doesn’t care. He licks you again, slower, deeper, and feels you flutter against his tongue.

His mouth seals over your cunt, tongue spearing deep, curling inside you like he’s trying to taste your heartbeat. The wet heat of you clenches around him, tight and pulsing, and he groans into your folds like he’s stumbled upon water in the desert. His fist loosens on your panties, the elastic snapping back to press against the jagged gash on his cheek, the fabric soaked and clinging to his skin. He doesn’t care, doesn’t feel it. He only feels you and your walls fluttering, your hips rocking in tiny, unconscious thrusts.

His thumb finds your clit, and he rubs small, frantic circles the way he knows you need when you’re close. Your thighs tremble and your breath hitches in a soft, sleepy whine. He answers with a harder press of his tongue, fucking into you in short, sharp thrusts, then dragging back up to lap at your clit again.

He pulls back just long enough to slide two fingers through your folds, giving him an eyeful of your messy cunt, then pushes his middle finger inside. One knuckle, two, curling hard against that spot that makes your back arch even in sleep. Your cunt grips him like a vice, and he adds a second finger, stretching you open, scissoring gently before curling again. His mouth returns to your clit, sucking hard, tongue flicking in time with the thrust of his fingers.

He’s moving so fast he’s dizzy.

Your body responds like it’s been waiting for this—hips rolling, thighs tightening around his shoulders, a soft, breathy “ah—” slipping from your lips. The monitors spike, your heart rate stuttering, brain waves flickering into sharp, frantic peaks. Toby feels it in the way you clench around his fingers, the way your slick coats his thick fingers and drips down his wrist.

He doesn’t slow down, just fingers you faster, tongue lashing your clit, thumb pressing hard circles until your thighs quake and your cunt flutters wildly around him. 

Come on, baby, he thinks, teeth grazing your clit just enough to sting. Come for me. Let me feel it.

You’re close. So close. He knows it. He knows you.

Toby’s eyes snap to your face the second your moan slips out, soft and drowsy, like you’re half-lost in a dream you don’t want to wake from. Your head rolls back against the padding, neck arching as your lips drag open into a lazy gasp. One arm lifts, fingers curling near your cheek before flopping back down, and your feet kick once, twice, heels scraping the leather in tiny, helpless jerks. It’s so you, so fucking cute even when you’re drugged and forcibly open for him, that a crooked, lovesick grin splits his face against your cunt.

He doubles down—tongue spearing deep, thumb grinding hard circles over your clit. His fingers pump faster, curling against that spot inside you that makes your hips buck. Your thighs clamp around his ears, trembling, and he feels it, the tell-tale lock-up of your muscles, the way your breath catches in a high, broken gasp.

There it is.

He pulls back just enough to mumble into your slick folds, voice muffled and raw, “C-C’mon, baby, give i-it to m-m-me. Fuck—”

Your body seizes. A full-body shudder rips through you, thighs clamping down, back arching off the table. Your cunt clenches around his fingers, pulsing in hot, wet waves as you cum, disgruntled moans and whines spilling from your lips. Slick gushes over his tongue, dripping down his chin, pooling under your ass. He drinks it, lapping greedily, tongue flicking through your folds to catch every drop, thumb still rubbing your clit in slow, soothing circles as the aftershocks roll through you.

Your hips twitch. Your toes curl. Your head lolls to the side, mouth open, drool glistening at the corner, and Toby groans into you, the sound vibrating against your oversensitive skin. He doesn’t stop until you’re limp again, until the last tremor fades and your thighs fall open, boneless.

He pulls back slowly, lips shiny, chin dripping. 

The monitors are screaming now, brain waves spiking into sharp, shaky peaks, heart rate fluttering like a trapped bird. Jack’s pen hasn’t stopped moving the entire time.

Eleven minutes left.

“That’s it,” Jack says, turning. “We’re—”

Toby’s already on his feet, belt clanking, zipper rasping down quickly. His jeans shove down just enough to free his leaking cock, the tip a terrible shade of red, twitching wildly in his palm. His hand wraps around the length, jerking once, twice, hips stuttering forward like he can’t not move.

Jack’s mouth opens. “Toby—”

“Shut up.” His growl is low as he speaks. “Stick t-to your fucking n-notes.”

Jack’s gaze hones onto your spread thighs—still trembling, slick and swollen, panties twisted to the side. Toby drags the head of his cock through your messy folds, coating himself in your release, smearing it up and down your slit. A broken moan tears from his throat when the tip catches on your entrance.

“Toby, the sedative’s wearing off in—” Jack starts.

Toby pushes in. One smooth, brutal thrust, burying himself to the hilt. Your cunt flutters around him, still sensitive, still dripping. His head falls back, eyes rolling, a guttural “Fuck—” punched out of him as he bottoms out.

Jack spins on his heel, chair creaking as he drops into it, back rigid and facing the wall. The monitors spike again with your heart rate jumping, a sharp, involuntary clench around Toby’s cock bullying into you.

Toby doesn’t wait. His hands grip your hips, fingers digging bruises into soft flesh, and he thrusts. Hard. Deep. The table rocks under the force, leather squeaking. Your body jolts with each snap of his hips, breasts bouncing under your rucked-up shirt, head lolling to the side. A soft, confused sound slips from your lips, but your eyes stay closed—but you stay asleep.

Toby leans over you, one hand braced beside your head, the other sliding up to palm your breast, thumb flicking your nipple. His thrusts turn erratic, desperate, hips slamming into yours with wet, filthy sounds. “Dammit,” he rasps, voice cracking. “M’sorry—”

Jack’s pen scratches furiously, pretending he can’t hear the slap of skin, the broken moans, the way your cunt squelches around Toby’s cock with every brutal thrust and the mind-numbing smell of it all.

Toby doesn’t care. He fucks you like he’s trying to brand you from the inside out.

He watches the back of Jack’s head like a predator, eyes narrowed, breath ragged. Jack’s claws rake through his own hair, dragging over the scalp in sharp, frustrated pulls. One hand drops to his face, palm pressing hard over his nose, trying to block the thick, heady scent of sex filling the room. His leg bounces, boot tapping a frantic rhythm against the floor.

Toby smirks, crooked and vicious, and lets the moan rip out of him, loud, shameless. “F-fuck, yeah… take i-it, baby—” His voice cracks on the stutter, but the words are clear. Another thrust, deeper, the wet slap of skin echoing off concrete. “You w-wanted this, Jack. Science, right?”

Jack’s shoulders stiffen. A low, uneasy sound escapes him, cursing under his breath. His claws scrape over the desk, leaving faint gouges in the wood. Then his hand drops, fumbling at his belt. The clink of metal, the rasp of a zipper. He doesn’t turn around, just hunches forward, forearm pressed to the desk, one clawed hand wrapping around his own cock. He strokes once, slow, then faster, hips jerking into his fist.

Toby’s eyes lock on the movement, the way Jack’s back arches, the way his claws dig into his own thigh for leverage. The sight punches a fresh wave of heat through him, cock throbbing inside your oozing cunt. 

“Shit, l-look at you—” he rasps, voice breaking. “J-jerking off to me f-fucking her. Freak.”

Jack doesn’t answer. Just strokes harder, claws clicking against the desk, breath hitching behind bared pointy teeth. His leg stops bouncing. His whole body tenses, coiled tight.

Toby leans over you, one hand sliding up to grip your jaw, thumb brushing your skin. He thrusts harder, faster, the table rocking dangerously. “G-gonna fill her up,” he growls, eyes never leaving Jack’s hunched form. “Gonna make h-her drip with i-it. You’ll sm-smell me on her for d-days.”

“Fuck—” Jack’s claws scrape the desk as his fist pumps faster, hips jerking into his grip. His arm presses harder against the wood, shoulders hunched like he’s trying to disappear into the shadows.

Toby laughs, breathless. “Y-you were all gung ho about t-this five minutes ago,” he pants, hips snapping forward, your cunt squelching around him with every thrust. “N-now you’re j-jerking off to it? Nasty f-fucker.”

Jack’s hand stutters, but he doesn’t stop. His claws dig deeper into the desk, leaving fresh gouges.

Toby leans up, sweat dripping from his brow. He slides his hands under your knees, hooking them in the crooks of his elbows, spreading you wide. Your legs dangle, limp and open, hips tilted up to take him deeper. The new angle drags the head of his cock against your front wall with every brutal thrust, and your body answers with a loud, dreamy whimper, thighs trembling.

“T-turn around,” Toby rasps, voice cracking on the stutter. “L-look at her. Look how g-good she’s taking it.”

Jack doesn’t move. His fist keeps moving, faster now, the wet sound of it gentle compared to the mess behind him.

“Jack.” Toby’s moan is filthy, teasing. “L-look at what you s-started. She’s dripping for m-me. F-fuck, she’s gonna cum again—”

Your cunt clenches hard, a fresh gush of slick coating his cock, and Toby’s head falls back, scarred cheek twitching up into a nasty smile. “See?” he snarls, hips slamming into you, the table scratching against the concrete floor. “She’s amazing, and you’re h-hard as fuck listening t-to me ruin her—”

Jack’s shoulders jerk. A broken sound tears from his throat, but he still doesn’t turn.

Your head lolls off the table’s edge, neck crooked, hair spilling messily over the side. Each thrust punches a loud, broken moan from your throat—raw, unfiltered noises that even Toby has never heard before. The sound ricochets off concrete, wet and desperate, and it’s the final crack in Jack’s restraint.

His chair spins. Head tilted, sharp teeth bared in a snarl that’s half-hunger, half-rage. His cock juts up, flushed dark, slick with precum that drips over his knuckles as he fucks his fist in frantic, uneven strokes. His nostrils flare, drinking in the thick, heady cocktail of sex and sweat and both of you.

Toby laughs, breathless and vicious. “Th-there he is,” he pants, hips snapping harder, the table creaking. “F-fucking look at her, Jack. Look h-how she moans for me.”

Your moans climb, louder, sharper, hips jerking in tiny, helpless circles. Your cunt clamps down, fluttering wildly, and Toby’s grin turns slack, eyes widening. “She’s g-gonna—”

You cum. A full-body shudder rips through you, back bowing off the table, thighs quaking in the crooks of his elbows. Slick gushes around his cock, dripping down your ass, pooling beneath you. Your mouth falls open on a silent scream, then another broken moan, “T-Toby—” 

It’s so slurred, and breathy, and garbled through sleep-thick air—but it’s enough to make both boys crazy.

Toby’s moan cracks into a growl. Jack’s follows, breathy and snarled, claws digging into his own thigh as his fist flies over his cock, precum splattering his jeans.

Their faces lock over your writhing body, then flick back to you, then to each other again, a silent, electric circuit.

Jack’s chest heaves. “Fuck, that was hot,” he rasps, voice gravel against the strain not to moan.

Toby’s grin is all teeth. “Y-yeah? Told you she’s perfect.”

Jack’s fist slows, slick with precome. “G-gonna cum?”

“Fuck yeah.” Toby’s hips stutter, cock dragging through your spasming cunt. “C-cum with me, Jacky.”

Jack’s nod is sharp, desperate. His claws dig into his thigh as he pumps himself faster again, eyes glued to where Toby disappears inside you.

Toby leans in, voice low and filthy, mocking his Jack spoke to him before this whole fiasco. “Imagine that f-fist is her tight little cunt, Jack. Warm. W-Wet. Squeezing you dry.” He thrusts hard, your body jolting. “She’d milk you, wo-wouldn’t she? Beg for it in h-her sleep.”

Jack groans, hips bucking. “God, yes, keep talking.”

“Bet she’d whimper y-your name,” Toby purrs, eyes gleaming. “‘Jack, p-please, deeper—’”

Jack’s head drops back, mask tilting to the ceiling. “Fuck, Toby—”

“Cum in her,” Toby hisses, thrusting deep, grinding against your cervix. “Paint h-her insides. M-Mark her.”

Jack’s moan rips free. His cock pulses, thick ropes of cum splattering his fist, his hoodie, his jeans. It drips over his claws hot and messy as he rides it out, hips jerking into his grip.

Toby follows a heartbeat later. “Now—” He buries himself to the hilt, cock throbbing as he unloads, pulse after pulse flooding your cunt. “Take i-it, baby—” He grinds deep, milking every drop, eyes locked on Jack’s spent, trembling form.

The room is thick with the after-scent of sex—sweat, cum, and the sharp tang of everyone’s arousal. Toby’s chest heaves, his cock still twitching inside you, every pulse a lazy throb against your oversensitive walls. Jack’s claws are slick, hoodie streaked, head tilted back just enough to show the glint of sharp teeth as he catches his breath.

They’re both opening their mouths to make some awkward statement or nasty joke, when a sound cuts through the haze.

A low, drowsy groan. Your arms shift, hands dragging up to rub at your eyes. Your knees tug weakly, thighs trying to close, but Toby’s still got you folded open in the crooks of his elbows. Your body jerks once, confused, then stills as the awkward angle registers.

Your eyes blink open, slow and syrupy.

Jack’s right there face slack-jawed, cock still in his fist, cum dripping from his claws onto the floor. You blink again, pupils blown wide with sleep and confusion, gazing at him upside down from where your head hangs off the table’s edge.

“…Jack?” Your voice is hoarse, cracked from unregistered moaning. You shift, and that’s when you feel it—Toby buried deep, stretching you, filling you, the wet heat of his release starting to leak out around him.

Your head lifts, hair sticking to your cheek. Toby’s grinning down at you, smiling like an idiot stupidly in love. “H-Hey, baby,” he pants, voice wrecked. “Welcome b-back.”

Your eyes dart from Jack’s spent cock to Toby’s smug face, then down to where your bodies are still joined. A slow, sleepy smile curves your lips.

“…Did I miss something fun?”

Jack lets out a long, mortified groan that echoes off the concrete.

“Shit, shit, I’m sorry,” he mutters, yanking his hoodie down over the mess on his lap and shuffling sideways like a crab. One clawed hand fumbles for a cupboard handle, towels spill out in a frantic white avalanche. He snatches a fistful and turns his back, ears burning deep purplish.

You laugh, absolutely delighted.

“Filthy perverts, both of you,” you tease, voice still husky from misuse. Toby hasn’t moved an inch, he’s still buried deep, hips flush to yours, cock twitching every time you clench around him. His fingers brush damp hair from your forehead, tucking it behind your ear with a tenderness that makes your chest flutter.

“I thought I was having the best dream,” you murmur, grinning up at him. “Turns out it was just you two being gross.”

Jack shuffles beside the table, cheeks flaming, and starts peeling monitors off your skin. The sticky pads come away with little rip sounds, one wire is hopelessly tangled around your arm from all the rocking. 

He untangles it with careful claws, muttering, “Got everything I needed. The data’s gold. I, uh… don’t need anything else. Sorry for the, um… fuss.” He gestures vaguely at the cum-streaked table, the puddle on the floor, his own sticky claws. “My perversion, not yours.”

Toby snorts, leaning down to press a lazy kiss to your cheek. “T-told you she’d be cool with it.”

“Did you now?”

Your hand snakes up and back, fingers hooking into Jack’s belt loop with a lazy tug where he stands a bit away from you. His jeans are still open, zipper half-down, and the motion drags him forward until the bulge in his boxers is right at your face, the heat of him radiating through the thin cotton. Toby’s grip on your thighs tightens, nails digging crescents into your skin as he watches, pupils blown wide.

Jack’s hands hover in the air, claws flexing, unsure where to land. “I—I’m good, really—”

“Shh.” You cut him off, voice syrupy and drowsy. “You didn’t get to touch me, right? And since Toby’s always a greedy little hog…” You roll your hips in a slow, deliberate circle, making Toby’s cock slide shallowly inside you, he whines your name, high and wrecked. 

“Hush,” you murmur, then tug Jack’s boxers down just enough to free him again.

His cock springs out, flushed dark, still slick with his own release, a fresh bead of precome pearling at the tip. You wrap your fingers around him, and Jack jerks, a sharp, startled moan ripping from his throat. His claws finally settle on the edge of the table, knuckles white.

Toby’s hips stutter, shallow thrusts chasing the heat of your hand on Jack. “F-Fuck, you’re evil,” he pants, but he doesn’t stop you, just watches, transfixed as you stroke Jack slow and steady, thumb swiping over the head to spread the mess.

Jack’s head drops forward, head tilting, breath fogging the air. “Shit, I—” Another moan, broken, as you twist your wrist just right.

Your smile is wicked, still drowsy around the edges.

“Aw, I’m sad I missed the fun,” you murmur, tongue darting out to wet your lips. “Tell you what… if I pretend to be asleep again, will you two fuck me as hard as you want?”

Toby’s grin is feral. Jack’s head leans back, a low, hungry growl rumbling behind it. They lock eyes—a confirmation, a challenge—and both nod like starved wolves.

You hum, satisfied, and guide Jack’s cock to your mouth. The slick tip slides between your lips, salty with his own release, and you take him in just past the head. A soft, sleepy moan vibrates around him as your eyes flutter shut, lashes fanning your cheeks. Your body goes lax again, head still hanging off the table’s edge, mouth slack and open.

Toby’s hips snap forward once, hard, burying himself to the hilt again. Jack’s claws dig into the table, a strangled groan tearing from his throat as your tongue flattens against him, warm and wet and perfect.

They don’t wait.

Toby sets a brutal rhythm, hands pressing under your knees to fold you open further. Jack threads careful claws into your hair, guiding your mouth down his length in shallow, greedy thrusts. The room fills with the wet slap of skin, your muffled moans, their ragged breathing.

Asleep, you take it all, and they give you everything.

๑ back to my kinktober masterlist

It wobbled, catching on an ashtray on the edge of the space, before it slowed from one face, to another, then—

Jack.

You would’ve thought a gaggle of crows had just found their way into the living room at the sound that erupted from the corner of the room.

Natalie and Toby lost it.

Natalie slapped the back of Jack’s head with a loud smack while Toby howled, kicking his leg higher over Jack’s thigh as if he needed the extra support to keep from falling over laughing. Jack didn’t look the least bit impressed. He sat there between them on the loveseat pushed into the corner, his absent sockets pointed blankly at the bottle, its tip completely motionless and aimed right at him.

You felt a pit form deep in your stomach.

Being locked in a closet with the resident cannibal suddenly felt a lot less like a fun party game and a lot more like a very bad idea.

People started whooping and cheering, especially Toby and Natalie, who were still losing their minds. Jack slowly stood up, shrugging both of them off like they weighed nothing. They tumbled dramatically into the arms of the loveseat, still cracking up and clutching their ribs as they reached for each other.

“Good luck, big guy,” Natalie wheezed, wiping tears from her good eye. “You’re gonna die in there.”

Toby pointed at you with one shaky hand, laughing so hard he could hardly sit up right. “Don’t let him eat you!”

You glanced around the room, hoping for even a scrap of mercy, but everyone else was either grimacing in sympathy or grinning like this was the funniest thing they’d seen all night. Jeff and Ben looked especially pleased with themselves.

Jack rounded the coffee table without so much as a word. His tall frame cast a long shadow over you as he came to a stop right in front, staring down with his blank gaze. The black voids of his eyes seemed to swallow the light from the lights overhead. He didn’t say anything. He didn’t need to.

Until, “C’mon.”

You nodded quickly and pushed yourself up from the floor, legs a little unsteady. Jack turned without another word and started down the hallway. You followed a few steps behind him, fingers picking nervously at the hem of your shirt. The moment you left the living room, you heard Jeff yell over the noise, “Ben. Music.”

The music rushed in seconds later—loud, gritty rock blasting through the busted speakers twice as loud as before, the bass rattling the old floorboards under your feet.

The walk down the hall felt longer than it should have. Jack’s broad shoulders took up most of the space, his steps quiet and even like a cat. When he reached the closet door, he opened it and stepped aside.

You stopped a few feet away, looking up at him. The overhead light in the hallway cast strange shadows over his face, making the black eyesockets look even deeper.

Jack gave a nod toward the inside of the closet. One of his ears twitched against his head as he spoke, “After you.”

You swallowed, nodded back, and stepped past him. Reaching up, you tugged the pull chain. The bare bulb clicked on overhead with a hum, washing the small space in weak yellow light.

It was smaller than you remembered. Way smaller. The coats hanging on the rod ruffled against your shoulders as soon as you stepped in, and the stacks of old boxes and junk left barely enough room to stand.

Behind you, Jack had to duck. He placed one large hand on the top of the doorframe and bent down to fit through, his frame nearly filling the entire doorway before he stepped fully inside. The door pulled shut behind him.

The music outside dulled to a rumbling, muffled thump.

Now it was just the two of you.

The closet felt even tighter with Jack in it. He had to keep his head slightly lowered so it wouldn’t hit the hanging rod, his shoulders almost touching both walls. You stood with your side pressed against the coats and your back shoved against the wall, your heart beating fast as you looked up at him.

He was tall—always had been—but in the cramped little closet he seemed enormous. The light overhead cast a sickly yellow glow over him, highlighting every unsettling detail. His muted gray skin, almost ashen in places, stretched tight over sharp cheekbones and a strong jaw. Pointed ears poked up through messy dark hair, occasionally flicking and twitching once he straightened as much as the low ceiling would allow. You’d occasionally catch the gleam of his sharp teeth between his lips or the flash of his claws when he moved.

He looked… bigger in here. Like the walls had shrunk just to make him seem more imposing.

And then there were his eyes.

Or rather, the places where his eyes should have been. Nothing but deep, endless black voids stared back at you. In the dim light, they looked infinite—like if you leaned in too close, you might fall forever into that darkness and never get out. It was unnerving. And strangely hard to look away from. Like all the awe and horror of a black hole swallowing a planet.

He was dressed simply in baggy black sweatpants and an oversized blue shirt that still somehow looked tight across his broad shoulders and chest. You think he tried to dress as normally as possible to offset everything else that was jarring about him… or maybe this was just all that fit his size.

You swallowed, pressing your back a little more into the adjacent wall.

“…Are you comfortable?” You fished for something to talk about.

Jack grunted, “Mhm.”

That was it.

You racked your brain for something—anything—to say, your fingers twisting together nervously.

“So… uh, how’s your night been going?” you tried.

“Fun.”

You nodded awkwardly. “The party got pretty wild after that fight, huh?”

He gave a nod.

You waited. Nothing else came. You think you could die.

You tried once more, voice a little more chipper. “You, um… you like playing these kinds of parties usually, or…?”

“Sure.”

You let out a small, nervous laugh and looked down at your hands. Talking to Jack had never been easy, but this felt like pulling teeth. The seven minutes had barely started, and the silence already felt suffocating. Jack remained perfectly still, towering over you, content to simply exist while you slowly unraveled under the weight of this encounter.

“So… what have you—”

“Calm down,” Jack cut in.

You blinked, caught off guard. “What?”

He let out a chuckle, the sound surprisingly warm. “Your heartbeat. It’s pounding so loud it’s giving me a headache. It’s gonna explode if you keep that up.”

Your face burned. You pressed a hand to your chest without thinking, feeling the frantic thud against your palm. The embarrassment made it worse.

“I—I can’t just make it stop,” you sounded exasperated.

“Yes, you can,” Jack replied simply. “You’re just not trying.”

You rolled your eyes, letting out a short laugh. “Fuck off. Quit with the weird body shit.”

Jack tilted his head, looking at your sideways. Then, in a dry, surprisingly sarcastic tone, he said, “Oh, sorry. Didn’t realize the doctor had to cut it with the ‘weird body shit.’ How many times have you come down to my room after a mission asking for painkillers again? Oh yeah… a lot.”

You stared at him, genuinely surprised. A laugh bubbled out of you before you could stop it.

“Wait… was that sarcasm? From you?”

Jack’s shoulders moved in a small shrug, the corners of his mouth pushing up just a bit.

“I have layers,” he said flatly.

“I didn’t know you could be funny.”

Jack hummed. “There’s a lot you don’t know.”

You shrug, picking at your fingers as you looked at the ground. “Maybe it’s because you’re always so quiet. People can get intimidated.”

“People are usually scared of me. Easier to stay quiet.”

The words were simple, matter-of-fact, but they landed with a strange weight in your chest that made you look back up at him.

“I’m not scared of you,” you said after a beat. It wasn’t entirely true, but it wasn’t entirely false either.

“You’re a terrible liar,” he chuckled.

You laughed despite yourself, the sound a little nervous but genuine. “Okay, maybe a little. But not… not like that. Not the way people usually are.”

He didn’t respond right away. The music outside pulsed dully through the walls, the bass vibrating faintly under your feet. Jack shifted his stance, trying to get a little more comfortable in the tiny space, and ended up closer to you than before. The warmth coming off him was noticeable.

“You’re shaking a bit,” he said quietly.

You hadn’t even noticed. You crossed your arms over your chest and tried to play it off. “It’s cold in here.” But that was a lie. If anything, it was just below sweltering.

“Semantics.” Jack hummed, clearly not believing you. But he didn’t push. Instead, he leaned one shoulder against the wall, giving you a little more room—or at least trying to.

It got quiet again.

For nearly a full minute, the only sounds were the muffled thump of music outside and the occasional creak of the old floorboards whenever one of you shifted. Your mind wandered to the living room—wondering what kind of shit was unfolding now, who was winning at whatever stupid game they’d moved on to, whether Toby and Natalie were still laughing their heads off about you and Jack being stuck in here together or if someone else had voiced their opinions on it.

Then Jack spoke very matter-of-factly. “See? There it goes.”

You blinked. “What?”

“Your heart,” he said. “It’s calm now. You did it.”

You let out a small breath, almost laughing. “Ah… I didn’t really try to do it, though. It just… happened on its own.”

Jack huffed, he almost sounded amused. “Semantics.”

You rolled your eyes. “You can’t just say ‘semantics’ every time I make a point.”

“I can,” he replied, completely deadpan. “And I will.”

“Jack.”

“Semantics.”

“Jack.”

“Semantics.”

“This is very demeaning, y’know.”

“Semantics.”

You laughed at him. You were about to tease him again when Jack suddenly let out a chuckle—wait, a laugh? Not the short, dry sound he usually made with little amusement, but something warmer that bubbled up and out of his chest. His mouth curved into a wide, toothy grin, his sharp teeth gleaming like little pearls. His eyelids squeezed shut over his sockets as he laughed, and you found the sight so odd, like pulling a curtain over some void and trying to pretend it wasn’t there.

The sight caught you completely off guard. You’d never seen him smile like that—so open and genuine, almost boyish. It made something flutter oddly in your chest.

You laughed with him before you could stop yourself, surprised and delighted all at once. “What? What’s so funny?”

Jack just shook his head, still smiling big. “Nothing. You’re just… funny.”

You stared at him for a second, still processing the expression on his face. Then the question slipped out before you could think better of it.

“Jack… are you drunk?”

It was quiet again for a beat, until Jack let out a deep chuckle. The sound started delighted but quickly turned sheepish when you asked.

“No way,” you gawked, eyes wide.

Jack shrugged one broad shoulder. “Is it so obvious?”

You shook your head, still smiling. “No, it’s just… funny. This is probably the most I’ve ever heard you talk. And you’re being sarcastic? I thought, either that or you’re tripping.”

He laughed again and you couldn’t help but laugh with him, a little stunned. You’d never seen him like this.

“I barely even saw you drink tonight,” you added, tilting your head. “How did you manage that?”

Jack didn’t answer right away. Instead, that smile on his face shifted from one cheek to the other as he looked down at you. Something about the way he was watching you made your stomach flip with nerves again.

Then, without a word, he lifted his hands.

You watched, frozen, as his large gray hands curled under the hem of his baggy shirt. He slowly pulled it up, just high enough to expose his midsection. Your eyes widened.

God, he was built. Thick, solid muscle sat under muted gray skin, abs clearly defined and right above a deep v-line etched into his just-visible pelvis. A dark trail of hair disappeared down into the waistband of his sweatpants. You felt a little dizzy just looking at him.

But then your gaze caught on something much brighter.

Tucked neatly into the waistband of his sweatpants, wrapped all the way around his torso like some ridiculous colorful bandolier, were about two handfuls of little 99 brand alcohol shooters. Tiny bottles in every color—cherry red, lime green, coconut, orange, grape—all strapped against his skin, hidden right under his shirt.

You gawked at it.

Jack glanced down at himself, then back at you, still holding his shirt up. He must have noticed you staring at the colorful little bottles strapped around his waist, because he let out a low huff of a laugh and explained, “Toby and Nat ransacked a gas station right before the party started. They stole a whole bunch of these and hid them on me. Said it was the best way to keep them from getting passed around.”

You blinked, connecting the dots. “So that’s why you three have been glued together all night.

Jack gave a small nod. “They keep sneaking me into corners or bedrooms so nobody gets nosy and asks for any. Works pretty well.”

That also explained why Toby and Natalie had been so cuddly and hysterical—they were definitely beyond wasted by now.

“There were a lot more two hours ago,” Jack added, almost wistful.

Your eyes kept drifting between the little shooters and the hard planes of his torso, the contrast between the silly colorful bottles and his gray, muscled skin making your brain fizzle out a little.

Jack huffed. “Your heart’s loud again.”

You startled, pressing a hand to your chest like that would somehow quiet it. “Sorry. I’m trying.”

He reached down and plucked one of the shooters from his waistband—a bright cherry red one. The tiny bottle looked comically small in his large, clawed hand. He held it out toward you.

You waved him off. “I’ve had enough tonight, really.”

Jack’s mouth curved into a small, toothy smile. “As your doctor,” he said, deadpan, “it’s in your best interest that you drink this.”

You let out a surprised laugh. “As my doctor?”

A low growl rumbled in his chest, all gravely, and dark, and way more effective than it had any right to be. Every hair on your body stood on end.

“Drink it,” he said, quieter this time, but no less daunting.

You swallowed, took the little bottle from his hand, and twisted the cap off. It snapped open with a tiny clicks. You brought it to your lips and downed it in one go.

It burned.

God, it burned—like liquid fire sliding down your throat, sharp and sweet and way too strong. You winced, your eyes watering as the intense wave of alcohol hit your system. You hissed sharply as it went down, immediately tossing the empty shooter to the floor. “Jesus Christ, Jack—that tastes like rubbing alcohol.”

Jack laughed, then reached down and plucked a coconut-flavored one from his waistband, twisted the cap off, and downed it in one smooth motion. His pointed ears pressed back against his head as he swallowed, and then—to your viewing pleasure—three slick, dark tongues slipped out from between his sharp teeth. They curled around his lips, cleaning what he missed before disappearing again.

You stared, a little dazed.

The words left your mouth before your brain could convince yourself that you shouldn’t say anything.

“…Do things taste better with three tongues?”

Jack paused, considering the question like it was a serious inquiry. Then he shrugged one broad shoulder.

“It feels more intense,” he said plainly. “Like the taste is tripled. Overwhelms your senses more.”

Your heart skipped a beat in your chest.

Jack’s head tilted, his ears twitching a couple times. He must have heard it, because his gaze stayed fixed on you for a long second.

“…Can I taste yours?” he asked, just barely grumbling.

You blinked. “I already drank it all.”

Jack’s mouth curved into a wonky, toothy grin. The realization hit you just as the alcohol did.

Oh.

The buzz finally crashed over you in a warm, dizzy wave. Your heartbeat suddenly felt loud in your own ears, muffled like the music outside. You wondered if this was what Jack always heard when he was around people—that constant, frantic drumming. It made you wonder what else he could hear.

He shifted his weight onto the leg closest to you, leaning in until the space between you felt almost nonexistent. His shadow fell over you immediately like a stormcloud.

“You can taste mine too,” he purred.

You opened your mouth to say something—“Um—”—but your foot caught the edge of a box next to you. You stumbled, your balance completely gone.

Jack moved faster than you could see.

One strong arm hooked under your side and hauled you upright before you could even gasp, pulling you flush against his chest. Your hands instinctively grabbed onto his arms, your fingers digging into the fabric of his shirt.

“Sorry—” you started, breathless.

Jack just grumbled. His hands settled heavy on your hips, holding you steady as he leaned down over you, his face hovering just above yours. The closeness made your heart stutter all over again.

You looked up at him, still gripping his arms. “I’m not a good kisser,” you whispered, pulling uselessly at straws to not make this seem awkward.

Jack’s response was immediate and blunt.

“Shut up,” he muttered. “Open your mouth.”

The command sent a shiver down your spine. You tilted your face up obediently, lips parting.

Jack leaned in closer. His own lips parted, and three slick, warm tongues slid out from between his sharp teeth. They brushed your lips first—tasting the area—before one of them pressed forward and licked into your lips and across your tongue.

Then he kissed you.

It was overwhelming.

The three tongues moved with a mind of their own, sliding against yours, curling around it, exploring every inch of  your mouth like they were starving for the taste of you. One licked along the roof of your mouth while another tangled with your tongue, the third teasing the space inbetween. The sensation was too much and not enough all at once, your hands moving up his arms to his shoulders to pull him closer.

A soft, surprised sound escaped you, muffled against his mouth. Jack answered with a low rumble in his chest, one hand sliding up your back to keep you pressed close while the other stayed firm on your hip.

He kissed like he did everything else—completely consuming.

You tasted coconut.

Jack pressed you back until your shoulder blades met the wall, one large hand planting beside your head while the other gripped your hip and pulled your lower body forward. The angle made your back arch slightly toward him. Then his hips rolled forward, and you felt the unmistakable, heavy shape of him pressing against your hip through his sweatpants.

You gasped sharply into his mouth and pushed weakly at his chest. “Sorry—” he slurred through a mouthful of you.

But Jack only tightened his grip on your hip and tugged you closer, grinding you against him with all the lack of resistance he had. His three tongues never stopped moving, overwhelming as they curled around yours and licked along the roof of your mouth, teasing the inside of your cheeks. You tried to kiss him back the best you could, but it was hard to keep up. Your breathing quickly turned shallow, little gasps and whimpers slipping out between the messy slide of tongues.

You’d never seen Jack like this.

He was usually so quiet, so reserved and mysterious. But right now he was surprisingly blunt, almost greedy with the things he was saying. This was probably the most you’d ever heard him talk, and you couldn’t get enough of it. The low growls, the occasional muttered curse, the way his voice dropped when he felt you react to him… it was doing dangerous things to your buzzed head.

You found yourself getting lost in those endless black voids where his eyes should be. The anxiety and embarrassment that had been clawing at your chest slowly melted away, like he was draining it out of you with every pass of his tongues and every roll of his hips.

Jack pulled back just enough to speak against your lips.

“Slow your breathing down,” he murmured, almost teasing you. One of his tongues slid across your bottom lip. “Still nervous?”

You let out a shaky breath, fingers curling tighter into his shirt.

“A little,” you admitted. Then, quieter, “Don’t stop.”

Jack made a deep, pleased sound in the back of his throat. His hand on your hip squeezed harder as he leaned back in, tongues sliding back into your mouth with renewed hunger. His hips pressed forward again, letting you feel just how hard he was against you. His lips eventually left yours, trailing slowly across your cheek, then down to your jaw. When they reached your neck, he pressed a slow, open-mouthed kiss there before dragging one of his tongues along your skin. The sensation made you shiver.

His hand left the wall and came up to the back of your head, his fingers threading into your hair as he firmly tilted your head to the side, giving himself more room. He licked wet, warm stripes up the side of your neck, then sucked just below your ear.

You gasped, your hands flying up to grip his shoulders. A nervous flutter shot through your chest as the reality of who he was hit you again.

“…Jack,” you breathed, half-joking but not entirely, “are you gonna eat me?”

He paused, his lips still pressed against your neck, before he begins chuckling against you.

“If you’ll let me,” he murmured against your skin, his breath causing goosebumps to rise across your shoulders. Your knees went weak instantly. A rush of heat flooded through you so fast it made you dizzy.

Jack must have felt it, because he straightened up, pulling back just enough to look down at you. One of his hands stayed on your hip, steadying you.

“You have no idea how brilliant your anatomy is,” he said plainly, as if he was just stating a fact. “I don’t mean to be crude… but your structure is perfect. I could map every inch of you with my eyes closed.”

You let out a startled laugh, your cheeks burning. The words were grotesque and strangely flattering at the same time.

“You can’t even see anyway,” you pointed out, still laughing a little. “Doesn’t that already mean you’re doing it with your eyes closed?”

“Kinda. It’s more like I’m looking through layers of thick film. Everything’s… foggy. I don’t understand it any better than you do. I stopped questioning how my body works a long time ago.”

You grinned, feeling bolder. “I don’t think you could actually do it without seeing. So what if you went to Yale, I’m still not that impressed with you.”

Jack’s hand lifted from the wall and reached above his head, his fingers finding the dangling pull chain of the overhead bulb.

You glanced up. “What are you doing?”

“So you know I’m not cheating,” he said simply.

He gave the chain a tug.

Click.

The light went out.

The closet plunged into near-total darkness, save for the thin sliver of hallway light bleeding in from under the door. For a second, your eyes struggled to adjust. And then you saw him.

In the dark, Jack was… horrifying.

The little light from beneath the door only barely outlined his silhouette, but it was enough. He looked like something that had crawled out of the woods at night—like something that you’d see in a horror movie. You understood his reputation, the stories you’ve heard from others about the things they witnessed the demon do, but you’d never faced the reality of it until now—never gotten a full picture of what he really was. His gray skin seemed to drink in what little light there was. The sharp points of his ears angled and swiveled to bumps and creaks all around. His claws curled at his sides, clenching the air as his shoulders slumped to account for the little space, his frame hanging over you. And those empty black sockets… they looked like holes punched straight through the sky. Bottomless. Ancient. You think they’d drop off like a cliff if you leaned any closer.

If you were anyone else, anywhere else—especially in the woods at night—you would’ve screamed and ran.

But you weren’t. Instead, you found yourself leaning closer.

Jack stepped in, pulling you against him with one arm around your waist. His mouth found your neck again, hot and wet as he kissed and licked along the flushed skin.

Then he began to map you. His fingers and lips moved carefully along your skin, until he pressed a kiss just beneath your ear.

“This is your Sternocleidomastoid,” he murmured against your skin, His clawed fingers traced the muscle on the other side of your neck, following the muscles shape. “Runs from here… to here.”

He dragged his mouth lower, his lips peppering your collarbone as his fingers followed.

“Clavicle,” he said, pressing lightly on the bone. “Deltoid…” His hand slid over your shoulder, squeezing the thick muscle there. “You hold so much tension right here.”

You shivered, little gasps and sighs as he massaged and traced areas. He had to maneuver you a bit, tugging you closer to his chest as he leaned down further. His fingers trailed down your side, his digits finding their way under your shirt until you felt them along your goosebumped skin. “External oblique…” His hand slid behind your back. “Latissimus dorsi…” Another kiss, lower this time, his teeth nipping as he moved. “You’re so well-built. Everything fits together so nicely.”

Jack’s hand slid down your arm until he caught your wrist. He lifted it and pressed a kiss to the thin skin on the inside, right where your pulse beat frantically.

“Right here,” he kissed it once more. “This vein runs straight to your heart.”

You thought it embarrassing how much you were shivering.

Then he moved his head lower, trailing his mouth down to your chest. He kissed you through your shirt, before slipping his hand from your back to your abdomen under your shirt. You felt shaky and exposed and way too vulnerable.

Jack’s claws curled and pressed in just a fraction at one specific point on your side, the sharp tips teetering on the idea of pressing further.

“This is your spleen,” he said with a little smile in his voice. “If I pressed any harder… I could puncture it. You’d bleed out quickly internally. It’d be so messy.”

He let the words settle in your head.

“Isn’t that interesting?” he whispered. “One little slip… and it could all be over.”

Anxiety twisted sharply in your stomach. But underneath it, something much darker and hotter stirred. Excitement. A sick, dizzy kind of thrill that made your thighs press together.

Jack noticed, because why-fucking-wouldn’t he? His claws dragged down your skin as his hand dipped lower, slipping toward the waistband of your pants. You grabbed his shoulders tightly.

“Wait—Jack, we don’t have much time,” you warned, looking to the door. “It’s gotta be almost seven minutes.”

He stopped for a second, only to chuckle to himself and lean back in, pushing a kiss against your jaw. Then, “I don’t think you really care,” he smiled. “Your body sure doesn’t.”

You whined as Jack’s hands roamed down your hips and around to your lower back, pulling you closer with a coaxing tug that said ‘I wasn’t really asking’. The heat of his palms bled through your clothes, making your skin prickle and scorch in spots.

“Shit,” you cursed under your breath, your nerves spiking to an all time high. “We can’t do this here—”

Jack just grinned at you. “It’s not me you’re gonna have to worry about getting us caught.”

You didn’t have time to ask what he meant.

His hands slid down and grabbed your ass, squeezing firmly. You squeaked, your hips jerking forward as you gripped the front of his shirt like a vice. Jack let out a satisfied noise and moved you exactly how he wanted—strong enough that you couldn’t have resisted even if you tried.

He spun you slightly, pressing your back more firmly against the wall as his fingers worked open the button and zipper of your jeans. The fabric gave way easily under his hands, the hem of your underwear peaking through the now-open folds. With one smooth tug, he shoved your jeans down your hips, letting them bunch around your thighs. The cool air hit your exposed skin and you shivered, trying to catch the breath that was so suddenly knocked out of you. Jack stood as straight as he could and examined his meal.

“Ah… fuck—just be fast, please,” you hissed.

Jack stood as tall as the low ceiling would allow, looking down at you by the bridge of his nose. And as if you couldn’t feel any smaller, he chuckled at you.

“You sure did give in quickly,” he hummed with satisfaction.

Embarrassment flooded your face. You squirmed against the wall, refusing to meet the place where his eyes should be. “Shut up and get on with it,” you grumbled, heat crawling up your neck.

Jack leaned in closer, planting one large hand on the wall beside your head. His other hand trailed down your side, then to your hip, before his fingertips drug over your stomach until they pressed firmly just above your pelvis. You tensed. Your hips tilted forward instinctively, fighting against the awkward bunch of your jeans still caught around your thighs.

His hand continued lower, stopping just above your clit, his palm hovering over the damp fabric of your panties. He leaned down until his mouth brushed your ear. “You’re in no place to get bossy right now,” he whispered, his breath tickling your ear.

Then he pressed one thick finger between your folds, right over your soaked panties. The fabric clung to you, and the moment his finger slid along your slit, it came away slick with your arousal. Jack kissed the edge of your jaw, peppering your skin, before pulling back just enough to look down between your bodies. A pleased sound escaped him.

“Well… this is a nice surprise,” and you could practically hear how pleased he was with himself.

You groaned in embarrassment and wrapped your arms tightly around his broad shoulders, burying your burning face into the side of his neck instead of letting him see you. His shirt smelled so strongly of his warm, crisp scent that it made you dizzy, but you’d rather hide from his taunting than pretend like it wasn’t turning you on something terrible. He could at least whisper it in your ear seductively, like a gentleman.

Jack’s finger continued rubbing exploratory circles over your clit, testing different pressures and angles to see how your body reacted. Every time he found a spot that made your hips roll or your breath punch out of you, he lingered there.

“You’re so sensitive,” he murmured, trying to sound plain, but the thrill in his voice gave away how much he was enjoying this. “Look at you… getting even wetter every time I touch you.”

“Shut up,” you whined, the words muffled against his shoulder.

“But I like it,” he hummed softly. “I like how your body tells me what you won’t.”

“Because you’d tease me,” you tried not to sound as pathetic as you felt.

Jack’s voice felt like somebody dragging a hot brand across your skin. “But you’d enjoy it, wouldn’t you?”

You didn’t answer. You couldn’t. The words got stuck somewhere between your pride and the heat scorching low in your belly.

Jack made a hum of acknowledgement, like he’d expected exactly that. His finger slipped beneath the edge of your panties, tugging the damp fabric to the side and exposing you to the air. You gripped him tighter, fearing if you’d let go you’d fall off the earth somehow.

He teased you—because why-fucking-wouldn’t he—dragging the pad of his finger along your folds, then higher up your inner thigh, then back again. But all so slow. He was enjoying how you tried (and failed) to stay still and not look desperate, your hips following wherever you felt his warm digits.

You pinched his shoulder in frustration.

Jack pinched you back, right on your upper thigh, “Impatient.”

“We don’t have time,” you nearly growled.

“Alright, alright,” he cooed.

Just as Jack’s fingers started honing toward your entrance, right when you thought he was finally going to give you what you wanted, you heard it. Heavy footsteps thumping down the hallway toward the two of you.

Your eyes flew open. Panic shot through you like ice water being poured over your head. You shoved at his chest, stumbling frantically, “Jack— I told you—”

But he didn’t stop.

Jack straightened up slightly, looking down at you like he always fucking did. His face was unreadable, but the corner of his mouth pulled up like he was amused. You tried to push his hand away, but he simply pressed forward, two thick fingers now sliding through your soaked folds and teasing at your entrance again.

“Jack—” you whisper-yelled, thinking maybe he thought you were still playing around, “we’re going to get caught—”

The footsteps grew louder, right outside the door now. Voices and laughter followed. But Jack brought his free hand up to his mouth in a little “shhh” motion, his pointer finger pressing to his lips. Then, without missing a beat, he reached beside him with that same hand and cracked the closet door open just an inch, enough for his face and upper torso to be visible while the rest of you stayed hidden against the wall and him.

Natalie and Toby’s voices burst through immediately.

“J!” Natalie called, clearly still drunk and delighted if the swimminess of her voice was any idea. “Time’s uuuup.”

Toby was laughing so hard he could barely speak, although nothing was really happening at the moment to warrant all the hysterics. “Is the poor thing still—HA—alive?”

But even still, Jack didn’t stop.

The tip of one thick finger pushed against your entrance, and before you could make a move to stop him, it pushed slowly into your aching cunt, stretching you open as you stood there, trapped between the wall and his body. You slapped a hand over your mouth instantly, eyes wide with panic and overwhelming pleasure as he sank the finger deeper, curling it lazily against your walls.

“Yeah,” Jack answered them, his voice back to its monotonous tone. “Alive. Barely.”

You clapped your hand over your mouth as his finger pumped in and out slowly, slick sounds barely masked by the loud music still blasting from the living room and their talking. Your knees trembled. Jack shifted his weight, pressing you harder against the wall to keep you upright while he casually chatted with his friends. You could see him trying to hold back a smile.

You couldn’t see Nat and Toby, but you assumed they were cheesing and standing on their tip-toes to try and get a view over Jack’s shoulder. “You didn’t actually bite ‘em, did you?”

Jack’s thumb found your clit just as a second finger tried to push in to join the first, the large digits catching on your entrance. It took shifting your hips, but they both pushed in. You could feel yourself clenching around him, having to bite down on your own hand to stay quiet.

“Not yet,” Jack finally grinned, his sharp teeth peeking out just as he curled his knuckles and massaged the inner wall of your cunt. “You shouldn’t eat big meals all at once.”

Toby wheezed with laughter. “You’re so w-weird, man. Hurry up and come out, we’re gonna d-do another round soon.”

Jack shifted his arm closer to your pelvis, the palm of his hand finding a home snug against your clit as he rubbed, curling his fingers just enough inside you to make small noises fight to escape.

“We’ll be out in a second,” Jack grinned. “We’re chatting.” The word alone sounded weird coming from his mouth, and Natalie sure didn’t miss it.

Natalie let out a loud, obnoxious laugh and slapped the wall on the other side of your head, making you jump. Jack acted like it was him adjusting, shifting his weight from one foot to the other. His fingers kept moving between your legs, massaging your soaked cunt as your slick dripped down over his knuckles. Your panties were absolutely ruined and you knew it.

He ignored her hysterics, turning his attention to Toby instead. “Hey. Remember those cases of beer you two stole? They’re still upstairs. Don’t forget them.”

It was like a starter pistol. Toby and Natalie immediately perked up.

“Oh shit, you’re r-right!” Toby shouted, already turning away. “We’re geniuses!”

Natalie cackled. “Jack, you’re a fucking genius. We’ll start another game! Take your time in there, you twoooo.”

Jack gave a small nod. “Start without us. We’ll be there soon.”

You heard their footsteps retreating down the hall, loud and clumsy with excitement, and maybe the sound of them shoving each other against the walls as they left. The second they were far enough away, Jack pulled the closet door shut, plunging you both back into near-darkness.

You immediately yanked your hand off your mouth.

“You asshole,” you hissed, smacking his chest. “I told you—I fucking told you—”

Jack just laughed, punctuating it as he curled his fingers deeper inside you. He bumped them, circling that perfect spot that made the words fizzle from your mouth.

“Did you hear that?” he leaned down next to your ear again. “They said we could take all the time we need.”

You gawked up at him, jaw dropping open in disbelief, but any protest died the moment he thrust his fingers harder, curling them just right until you felt a deep pressure in your gut. Your knees buckled. You tried to cover your mouth again, but the demon pulled your hand away.

“Jack—” you whimpered, pressing your head back against the wall to try and get some air.

He hummed in satisfaction, watching as he pumped his knuckles in and out, and in and out. “That’s what I thought,” he whispered, nipping at your earlobe.

Just when you were about to give in, when your nerves finally melted under the heat of his touch, Jack easily pulled his fingers out of you.

You gawked at him, all breathless and frustrated. “You’re such an asshole.”

He just kept grinning. “For somebody who keeps saying we shouldn’t be doing this… you sure do get upset when I stop giving you what you want.”

Your face burned with embarrassment. Before you could snap back at him, his hands moved to your jeans, still bunched around your thighs. He tugged them down with ease, and you helped him by shimmying and kicking them off when they caught around your sneakers. They landed in a heap somewhere beside you. Then his thumbs hooked into the waistband of your panties. He snapped the thin fabric against your hip, making you hiss, before dragging them down your legs. You started babbling nervously, words tumbling out without thought.

“Jack—wait, this is—this is bad—we’re gonna get caught, someone’s gonna come back and—oh my god—”

Either he didn’t hear you or he didn’t care. Your panties slid down your thighs and pooled at your ankles. You managed to kick one foot free, but the other stayed tangled as Jack placed one large hand on the inside of your thigh and pushed your legs further apart. You tried not to shiver—out of nervousness or excitement, you weren’t sure—but you gripped the bottom of your shirt like it could somehow hide you. You felt so unbearably exposed, just standing there half-naked like there weren’t people just feet away outside.

“You smell so fucking good,” he murmured. “So sweet.”

“Jack…”

“I’ve wanted to taste you for a long time,” he admitted. “Now I finally get to.”

Jack dropped to his knees in front of you.

The floorboards creaked under his weight, and you felt it in your bones—that heavy, solid presence suddenly lower, looking up at you from the most beautiful angle you think you’d ever seen. It was a terrifyingly beautiful sight. He was so tall that even on his knees he took up most of the space, his broad shoulders sitting at your waist-height. His large hands came up to grip your thighs, thumbs rubbing from your hips down toward your knees, coaxing your legs further apart. You felt like you could crawl up the wall from pure nervousness as he leaned in closer.

He started soft.

Warm lips pressed to your hip, then lower to your pelvis, peppering slow, open-mouthed kisses across every inch of soft skin he could reach. His breath was hot against you. When he finally settled fully between your thighs, his face hovered right in front of your cunt. You could feel him grinning—you could feel it.

You reached down with shaky hands, grabbing fistfuls of his messy hair to steady yourself. “Jack… please be easy,” you whispered.

He tilted his head up. “What are you so afraid of?” His lips brushed your inner thigh as he spoke, and you had to swallow your nerves.

“Your teeth…”

Jack pulled back just enough to show them off—the sharp, gleaming points smiling up at you. Then, just to be funny, he snapped his teeth together right in front of your cunt, the clack making you jump.

He chuckled. “You’re alright. I won’t hurt you.”

Before you could say anything else, Jack leaned in fully. He pressed a soft kiss just above your clit, his nose brushing against your skin. Then his mouth disappeared between your legs.

“I won’t hurt you a bit.”

The first touch of his tongue made you melt.

One thick, warm, wet tongue pushed slowly between your folds, dragging up through your slick heat and soaking in the taste. The feeling was overwhelming—hotter and more intense than you expected. He groaned at the first taste, the vibration rolling straight through your core as he licked again, like he was tasting something he’d been starving for.

Your grip tightened in his hair, a broken whimper slipping from your lips as your head fell back against the wall.

Jack’s hands slid around the backs of your thighs, gripping firmly as he angled your hips forward, opening you up even more for him. He pressed his face deeper between your legs and licked a broad stripe through your folds, dragging the flat of his warm tongue right over your clit.

It felt like a thick, wet tentacle sliding against you, like it had a mind of its own. His spit coated your cunt in a ridiculous amount, dripping down your thighs and making everything messy and obscene. For someone so stoic and quiet in his everyday, Jack was suddenly a mouthful of grunts and hungry groans against your skin. His pointed ears fluttered against the sides of his head with every lick, and his claws tugged and gripped against your thighs like he couldn’t pull you close enough.

You felt your resolve completely dissolve.

Your bones went soft, your legs relaxing as you started grinding against his tongue, chasing the pleasure with desperate rolls of your hips. Jack groaned deeply in response like he was approving the movements.

“Mhhm…” you whimpered, trying to curb your embarrassment to let him hear you. “Feels so good, Jack… feels really good—”

He made an appreciative sound and nudged the tip of his tongue against your entrance. It took some effort, but his fingers had done most of the hard work of stretching you, so your eyes rolled deliciously as his tongue breached your entrance and nudged its way inside your cunt. His tongue was longer and thicker than his fingers had been. It slid into your soaked heat with ease, warm and gummy from how wet you already were, reaching deeper than anything had before. You whined loudly, your hips jerking as he began to fuck you with it with thrusts that curled and stroked inside you.

Jack groaned as your hands gripped his messy hair, his eyelids slowly closing over those dark abysses you keep getting lost in.

But Jack was completely lost in you—eating you like a starving man, grunting and growling against your cunt while his claws dug into the soft flesh of your thighs, holding you open for his mouth. Every time you clenched around his tongue he made a pleased noise and pushed even deeper than before.

You opened your mouth to say something—anything—but the words died on your tongue the moment you felt it. A second tongue nudged insistently against your full entrance, probing and pushing alongside the first. It tried to slip in, but the angle was tight. You shifted your hips, trying to help, but Jack made an impatient growl and moved.

One of his large hands slid down the back of your thigh, hooked under your knee, and lifted it smoothly. He pushed your leg up and outward, spreading you open even wider before resting your knee over his shoulder. The new position left you imbalanced, and you had to halfway hold onto the wall and him for support.

But that was all the room he needed.

The second tongue nestled in alongside the first with a lewd plunge. You groaned loudly, your head falling to your shoulder as you felt too dazed to stand up straight. Two thick, warm tongues filled your cunt, pushing and pulling, curling and stroking against your walls in a messy, uncoordinated rhythm that somehow felt even better because of it.

“Fuck—Jack—” you whimpered, your voice breaking on every word.

He groaned in response, letting you know it felt good for him too. His claws dug into the soft flesh of your thigh as he held your leg in place beside his head. The sensation was insane. You felt so impossibly full, every inch of your cunt being claimed by him. Spit and your own wetness dripped down your thighs and his chin as his tongues worked deeper, twisting and exploring like they were trying to map every part of you from the inside.

You felt it before you could even process it—before you’d even had time to process the second one—a third tongue slipped from between his lips, sliding wetly between the other two. It nudged right up against your swollen clit, pressing and rubbing torturously well.

A violent shiver ripped through you. Your hands flew from his hair to his ears, your fingers curling around the pointed tips to get some semblance of stability.

Jack shuddered. His whole body jolted like he’d been shocked. His ears pinned flat against his head for a second before flicking wildly under your touch. The reaction was so sudden and strong that you both froze for half a heartbeat.

Then, cautiously, you started rubbing them.

Your thumbs stroked over the sensitive tips and along the soft lobes, gently feeling his cat-like ears. He tried his best to keep licking you, but kept getting caught on stiff moans.

“Jack…” you gasped. “Umm… Does that feel good?”

He nodded against you, jaw and chin bumping messily into your soaked folds. He was taking deep, loud breaths through his nose, exhaling against you. Then the most unexpected sound rumbled out of his chest.

A low, rumbling purr.

At first you thought it was just your own nerves buzzing in your head, but no—you could feel it. The vibration rolled through his chest and straight into your bones, all warm and constant, making your toes curl and your eyes flutter shut.

“Oh my god—” you moaned, your mouth falling open as the sensations intensified. It felt obscene, like his entire body was vibrating against your most sensitive places and melting your mind.

Jack was losing himself, too. His purring grew louder, deeper, as you kept stroking and rubbing his ears. His tongues moved with renewed hunger—two thrusting and curling inside you while the third flicked and sucked messily at your clit. It seemed as if he was wholly content on drowning himself in you. 

You were babbling now, open-mouthed and shameless. “Fuck—Jack, that feels—hah—oh god—I can’t—please—”

The pressure built fast—too fast. A sudden, overwhelming wave of bliss crashed over you, pulling a sharp gasp from your throat.

“Jack—Jack, I’m gonna cum,” you whimpered, scrambling to hold him tighter.

His eyelids fluttered open halfway, empty eyesockets staring up at you while you trembled. You got lost staring into them, your head spinning to a heap of mush as you felt pleasure running your veins. That look alone pushed you over the edge.

You came so miserably hard.

Your whole body seized up, thighs shaking violently around his head as pleasure ripped through you in crashing waves. You clenched desperately around his tongues, moaning loud and shamelessly as your orgasm flooded his mouth. Jack groaned at the beginning of the taste, your slick flooding his senses so quickly it made him just as delirious as you.

His tongues stiffened inside you, pressing and nudging firmly against your rapidly clenching walls, milking every last pulse of pleasure as he sucked greedily on your clit. His nose stayed crammed tight against you, his lips sealing around you as he swallowed again and again, drinking everything you so graciously were giving him.

You were loud at first—broken moans and desperate praises spilling from your lips without filter. But as the peak began to fade, it melted into soft, mewled whines and shaky groans. Your orgasm turned into a rippling, lingering current deep in your gut, sending aftershocks through your body that made your legs twitch and your hips jerk weakly against his face.

With some effort, Jack began to tug his tongues from your body one at a time, the thick muscles sliding out of you, and a mess of slick followed. Jack made sure to lick it all up, his tongues running through your folds once more, savoring every twitch and flutter like he couldn’t bear to pull away.

You gasped sharply, everything suddenly feeling way too oversensitive.

“Jack—wait, it’s too much,” your voice was hoarse. “Too sensitive—”

He made a reluctant sound but slowly retreated, his tongues slipping back into his mouth like it pained him to do so. He sat back on his knees, looking up at you. His chin and mouth were glistening with a messy mix of his spit and your slick, and those black voids stared at you with unmistakable longing.

The moment he pulled away, the leg you still had planted on the floor buckled. You slid down the wall with a surprised yelp, landing in a boneless heap in front of him. Your ankle was still hooked over his shoulder, leaving you sprawled and openly exposed across his lap.

Jack caught you instantly though, his strong hands bracing your waist so you didn’t hit the floor too hard. You panted quickly, your chest billowing up and down as you tried to catch your breath. It felt like your whole body was buzzing.

Before you could even try to sit up, Jack gripped the ankle resting on his shoulder and tugged upward. You were pulled further down until your ass rested on top of his knees, your shoulders braced against the baseboards behind you. You felt like you were folded in half. You tried to scramble upright, feeling awkward, but Jack was already catching your other leg—the one with your panties still dangling uselessly from the ankle—and lifted it smoothly onto his opposite shoulder.

“More,” he grumbled.

Your stomach flipped with panic.

“No, no, no—wait, I need a minute,” you babbled through deep breaths of air, throwing your hands up. “I can’t—you’re too much, I need to breathe—just for a second—”

But he wasn’t listening. His focus had narrowed completely. Those endless black sockets were fixed between your legs with single-minded hunger.

“I’m sorry,” was all the response you got.

“Jack—”

He handled you like you weighed nothing.

His hands gripped your hips firmly and pulled your lower half upward in one smooth motion. Your knees hooked over his broad shoulders as your head and shoulder blades slid and landed against the floor. Your body folded almost in half, completely upside down, your shirt riding up to expose your stomach and chest. His large arms wrapped around your torso, strong hands gripping the soft flesh of your sides, holding you securely in place so you couldn’t even squirm out of it if you wanted to.

“I’m sorry,” he murmured again, but there was no real remorse in it. If anything, he just sounded excited. “You just taste so fucking good… I need you to cum again. Just a little more. Then I’ll be done.”

Your head was already spinning from the rush of blood, so you had no fight in your body or your words. You gripped his arms tightly, trying to brace yourself.

“Let’s just go to my room,” you fussed, trying to get him to just take a second. “It’s way too cramped in here, we can’t—”

But every protest died on your tongue the instant you felt it.

A familiar sensation dragged up through your soaked folds in a broad, wet lick. Your legs fell open limply over his shoulders as a broken moan wailed from your throat. The new angle gave him the perfect access, angling you however he wanted.

“Oh god…”

Jack moaned as he licked again, savoring every inch of you like he couldn’t get enough. His arms tightened around your torso, pulling your hips up and against his hungry mouth.

“Fuck…” he rasped against your cunt. “Do you even know… mhnnn… how good you taste?”

Jack’s eyelids fluttered shut again, the black voids disappearing as he focused entirely on you.

Then you saw it—the absolute horror and fascination of his other two tongues slipping out from between his lips to join the one. They were sickly blue-black, glistening and drooling with spit, long and monstrously thick. They dangled for a moment before curling forward, licking up the insides of your thighs until they finally converged, forking together right at your entrance.

Through a mouthful of his own tongues, Jack mumbled against your cunt, “Jus’ hang on to me.”

You dug your nails into his forearms, your breath coming in short, panicked gasps as the three tips pressed against your pulsing entrance at once. Your hips jerked, thighs instinctively trying to clamp shut around his head, but Jack held you firmly in place. It took a little work—a slight shift of your hips, a change of the angle—but eventually, the three tongues wiggled their way inside you together.

The stretch was impossible.

You let out a keening moan as your walls were forced open wider than they’d ever been, the bulbous, wet muscles filling you as completely as they could reach. No inch of room was left untouched. The sensation of burning was so intensely good that your mind went fuzzy at the edges. Your body went limp and mushy in his hold, your legs shaking helplessly over his shoulders as he sank all three tongues as deep as they could go.

Jack groaned loudly into you, the sound vibrating through your core as he began to move them, greedy thrusts and curls that rubbed against every sensitive spot inside you at once. Spit and your own arousal dripped messily down your ass and stomach as he practically fucked you with them. 

You could barely think. All you could do was cling to his arms, your mouth open in a silent cry as he devoured you from the inside out, purring and growling enough to cause concern that he might actually be eating you.

And as if it couldn’t get any worse—or wonderfully better—Jack shifted one of his arms from your torso up to between your legs. His thumb found your throbbing clit and began rubbing slow circles over it, smearing your own wetness across the sensitive bud.

The shock of pleasure was devastating.

Your back arched hard off his lap, spine curving sharply as a silent cry tore through you. Your hands flew up above your head, palms slapping against the wall behind you for any kind of leverage. You tried to speak—tried to moan his name, to beg, to curse—but nothing came out. All the air had been punched out of your lungs. The only sounds your body could produce were the wet, filthy squelches of your cunt accommodating its intruder. You bucked your hips desperately, riding his face as much as your weak, trembling legs would allow. Every thrust of his tongues and stroke of his thumb sent white-hot sparks shooting up your spine. Your thighs shook violently over his shoulders, muscles twitching uncontrollably as you ground yourself against his mouth and tongue like you’d lost all semblance of control.

Jack’s purring grew louder, deeper, the constant rumble vibrating straight into your cunt and making your eyes roll back. He was completely lost in you, this newfound, insatiable hunger dampening his mind until all he could do was eat. You couldn’t even form words anymore. Couldn’t even think anymore.

You felt it building again—that familiar coil tightening deep in your core, winding tighter and tighter with every thrust of his tongues and stroke of his thumb.

“Ja… Ja—ck… Jaahh—” you tried to warn him, but your voice was just as useless as the rest of your body. Your hand slapped weakly at his arm, your fingers grappling desperately as panic rose.

But Jack didn’t stop. Of course he didn’t. If anything, he doubled down. Tears welled up in the corners of your eyes, spilling over and running down your flushed cheeks as the pleasure became almost too much. You managed one shaky, broken whimper of his name right before you felt it.

Little sharp pinpricks.

Your eyes flew open through the tears. Jack had pulled back just enough for you to see his face. His lips were pulled back in a growl, sharp teeth fully exposed and pressed right against your slick, sensitive folds. Not breaking skin, not hurting you, but just resting there, a deadly reminder of exactly what he was.

You almost found it shameful how quickly that ruined you.

Your eyes rolled back, lashes fluttering uselessly as your vision blurred. You saw his face, then the ceiling, then the back of your eyelids—and then white.

“I’m cumming—fuck, I’m cumming—” you blabbed, trying ridiculously hard to say nearly nothing. “Jack—I’m—oh god—”

This one slammed into you harder than the last.

Your whole body seized up, back arching violently as you came with a silent, open-mouthed cry. Your cunt clenched hard around his invading tongues, pulsing and gushing around them as wave after wave crashed through you. Tears streamed down your face pathetically.

Jack growled louder against you, the sound feral and satisfied as he drank down every drop you gave him. His tongues kept working you through it, thrusting and curling relentlessly gathering everything they could.

“Jaaaaack—” you mewled.

He finally pulled his tongues out of you with a wet pop sound, leaving you clenching around nothing. He was panting hard against your cunt, his breath hot and ragged as he licked slowly through your folds, then across your trembling thighs, cleaning every trace of your release like he couldn’t help himself.

Your legs slipped weakly from his shoulders, falling limply around his hips. For a long moment, the only sounds in the tiny closet were your shared heavy breathing and the distant thump of music as you tried to calm yourselves. Jack looked down at you, his face glistening with your slick. He stayed quiet, just watching you with those endless black sockets while you tried to remember how to breathe.

When your breathing finally evened out a little, he asked softly, “Are you alright?”

You managed a small, shaky nod.

Jack carefully helped you sit up, guiding your back against the wall. “Can you stand?”

You tried shifting your weight, but your legs felt like jelly. You shook your head, embarrassed.

He let out a low chuckle. “It’s alright.”

Jack moved your legs gently off his lap so he could stand. He turned and rummaged through the hanging coats until he found one that looked soft and long enough. Without an explanation, he draped it over your mostly naked body, wrapping it around you like a blanket. Before you could even thank him, he leaned down and scooped you up into his arms. One arm hooked under your knees, the other supporting your back as he held you securely against his chest. He bent down just enough to snag your discarded jeans off the floor.

You clutched the coat tighter around yourself. “Jack, I can’t go out there like this…”

He chuckled again, the sound warm in his chest. “Toby and Nat have everyone occupied by now. No one’s gonna notice.” He pressed a quick kiss to the top of your head. “Besides… I think a nice bath in my room could do you some good.”

You hesitated for half a second, then nodded, too tired and floaty in the head to argue.

Jack cracked the closet door open, listening for a moment, his ears swiveling around. When the coast seemed clear, he slipped out with you cradled against him, your arms grabbing around his neck. You both moved quickly down the opposite end of the hall, away from the noise of the party. Laughter and shouting echoed from the living room as you snuck up the stairs like two stowaways.

He never let his grip loosen on you for a second.

Thanks for reading! Comments and kudos are appreciated!

๑ prologue

๑ back to my masterlists

Ordinarily, your work does not put you in the direct line of the Harbingers. You’re more of the downstairs kind; the neat little maid who peeps into bedrooms only when they’re empty, to dust mantelpieces and clear the ashes of fireplaces and make the beds so that the inhabitants of Zapolyarny Palace find their abode in perfect condition no matter when they return to it. In the rare cases that somebody does enter a room whilst you’re working, you’re to stand in front of the nearest wall and avert your eyes until they’ve passed, or until you can find a suitable moment to back out of the space and leave them to their business. Whatever that is.

One doesn’t get very far in this line of work if they’re too interested in what goes on behind closed doors here.

Speaking of closed doors: you have drawn to a stop before Lady Sandrone’s chamber door, the tea tray in hand. A brief frisson of fear goes through you: you are not used to being looked at. You are not used to having the eyes of your betters upon you. You try to resist the urge to pat your hair and pull at your clothes to make sure that you’re presentable: you’re certain they won’t give you more than a moment’s notice.

You’re simply furniture to them, you remind yourself, as you balance the tray carefully on one hand in order to give a sharp tap upon the door. A low, amused voice comes from within that most certainly does not belong to Lady Sandrone.

“Come in.”

Of course they do not get the door for you; that would make things far too easy. They probably have not even thought that you might struggle to do so: servants are furniture, after all. You carefully use your elbow to press down the door handle and your shoulder to push it open, thankful that they have at least thought to kept the door unlocked. You slowly enter the room, the teapot and the teacups on their heavy silver tray held before you like it is a sacrifice to them.

It takes a moment for your eyes to adjust, and when they do your breath catches in your throat at the sight of the four beautiful Fatui Harbinger women before you.

“Oh!” Lady Columbina – you recognise her, the ethereal woman with the mask over her eyes. “Our tea!”

They’re dressed as casually as you’ve ever seen; whenever the newspapers or magazines print images of Harbingers, they’re always draped in furs and silks, proud faces staring from the pages. But here, in Lady Sandrone’s rooms, they are dressed down as if ready to sleep. The Fair Lady reclines on a sofa in a ruffled nightgown. Lord Arlecchino wears slippers and a shirt open low in the chest. Lady Sandrone and Lady Columbina wear comfortable nightgowns – frilled and embroidered, naturally, and far more expensive than anything you’ve owned in your life, but undoubtedly nightwear all the same.

You try to bob into a curtsey and almost spill the tea, your cheeks going hot at the feeling of being looked at by all of them. Their attention focuses in upon you: far more than they would a piece of furniture.

“Oh,” purrs the Fair Lady, stretching out on the sofa like a cat before she pushes herself up. “Good. They sent a pretty one, like I asked.”

She moves towards you with purpose, with a leonine kind of grace that makes your heart beat too fast in your chest. The neckline of her nightgown hangs off her shoulder, and you’re struck suddenly by how much taller she is than you. How much this feels like a cat playing with a mouse.

“M-may I put the tray down and leave you in peace, My Lady?” You ask, your voice coming out in a nervous warble – and from the armchair in the room, a lower voice gives a satiny chuckle.

“You’re scaring them, Rosalyne,” says the Knave, and you see that despite her words she has a mild smile on her face. Lady Sandrone scowls.

“Put it down then,” she says. “Come into the room and let us look at you.”

“My . . . My Lord Harbingers--”

An impatient click of Sandrone’s tongue.

“We don’t have all day, you know,” she says, waspish. You’ve heard of Lady Sandrone having an awkward demeanour and a temper that’s quick to fire – you suppose they’re right. Still. You do not want to be getting on the wrong side of any Harbinger. You think helplessly of the tasks you haven’t yet gotten to (the windowsills are supposed to be dusted down, the grand table laid for supper) – but you’ve been witness to too many conversations about how the Harbingers treat those who displease them then to want to find yourself amongst those ranks.

Awkwardly, you bob another curtsey as you walk into the room proper. Signora gives a satisfied hum, and you just about manage to stop yourself from jumping in alarm when the door slams shut behind you and you hear the unmistakeable click of a key turning in the lock.

You place the tea tray upon the low table in the room. You’re grateful to see that not a drop of it has spilt. At least you can be certain of one thing amongst all of this strangeness.

You fist your hands in your apron, horribly aware of how it feels to have so many people’s eyes (although you’re not sure if you can truly consider the Damselette to be ‘looking’ at you) upon your form when you’re so used to being an invisible member of the masses. Signora walks back into the centre of the room, taking her place on the sofa once more although not lying prone upon it again. Instead, she leans forward slightly, interest colouring the one visible eye.

“Come here,” says the Knave, curling her fingers toward you and motioning to the spot in front of her chair. The Damselette has drifted towards the three other Harbingers and you now, taking a seat on the floor on her knees. There’s a faint smile on her face, too. Your cheeks still hot, you follow the instructions as a servant is supposed to, and find yourself stood before the woman. “Turn around and face the others,” she says, her voice still quiet and calm, strangely comforting in this unusual situation. You swallow audibly, but do as she says.

“My . . . Ladies?” You hazard, aloud, but your words are stopped in the air as quickly as they come when Arlecchino places her hands consideringly upon your hips, her fingers curling into the soft flesh there.

“Very nice,” says Signora, appreciatively. Sandrone makes a soft harrumph.

“They’ll do, I suppose,” she says, as Columbina stands from her position and practically floats over to Marionette. That faint smile on her face does not budge an inch, as she lays a hand on Sandrone’s shoulder and gives her own nod of assent, humming out a snatch of melody. A faint flush rises in Sandrone’s cheeks.

“D-do for what?” You ask, your voice coming out quiet and warbling in the room, which suddenly seems to have gotten ten times hotter than before. Arlecchino laughs softly, her hands curving down over your hips, lower and lower beneath the apron and the skirt of your uniform, until they alight on bare thigh. You let out a surprised cry, realise what you’re doing, and try to stop the cry in its tracks by biting into your lower lip.

“Oh,” Signora practically coos, and now she’s standing too, walking towards you with a sultry sway in her hips. You hadn’t realised just how tall she was before, but your eyeline is roughly around her generous chest before she leans down towards you and uses one finger to tilt your chin up to look her in the eye. “Absolutely adorable. I think I’ll allow myself the pleasure of being first.”

“First--?”

Your words are stopped by Signora’s hand wrapping around the back of your head and pulling you in for a kiss that feels like it burns down to your bones.

There’s a cry of complaint from across the room that you think comes from Sandrone, but you can’t concentrate with the Fair Lady’s mouth pressed against yours, soft and cool and full. Her tongue laps across the seam of your lips, and in surprise you open them and she takes the opening and slips it into your mouth. Arlecchino’s hands on your thighs move to grip, holding you in place – but her fingertips come far too close to the place between your legs, and panic alights like a dull flashing light in your brain.

Your gasp is swallowed up by the kiss you’ve found yourself in, though, and so you’re helpless to do anything other than let yourself be anchored in place and let Signora plunder your mouth hungrily.

After another long moment, another sweep of her tongue, she pulls back from you with a satisfied sigh and a wet pop. She regards you with a smile from beneath her half-closed eyelid.

“Oh, but you’re a sweetheart, aren’t you? Arlecchino, you ought to kiss them too, seeing as you helped so much . . .”

“These are my chambers--” Sandrone’s outraged voice seems to rise in pitch, but Signora turns and holds a finger up to the incensed other Harbinger. Columbina keeps her hand where it is, even as Sandrone seems to burn with the indignation of it.

“Watch. If anyone can work them over, it will be our Knave. You know what an effect Lord Arlecchino has on the . . . timid ones.”

You don’t know quite what you expect, but you don’t expect the tug backwards on your thighs until you find yourself pulled onto Arlecchino’s lap, all ungainly frills and aprons and lace and stockings. Your face is so hot you fear you could fry an egg on it, but you’re too scrambled by everything going on to say anything, as much as you want to babble out your apologies and run for the door.

Arlecchino, though, seems to know exactly what to do – she pulls you closer against her, rearranges your uniform, and then you find yourself sitting on her lap with your back to her front, your legs bracketing one of her solid thighs.

“Poor thing,” Arlecchino murmurs into your ear, her voice soft and low and soothing. “You’re not used to being looked at, are you? Don’t worry. You’re very easy on the eye.”

You want to protest against that, but Arlecchino has reached between you both and you give a squeak of surprise as your apron falls to the floor, untied by one clever hand.

“You don’t need all of this in front of us,” Arlecchino continues. “It’s easier if we take it off, isn’t it? Ah. The dress too, I think--” The soft clink clink clink of the hooks and eyes of your dress being removed, and this garment is pulled over your head and you cry out aloud as you’re left in just your underwear in front of all four of the Harbingers. “There we are. Oh, you are pretty.”

The Damselette, never one for traditional manners, removes her hand from Sandrone’s shoulder to walk over to you – even with her eyes covered, you can sense her interest, and she hums in the back of her throat as she runs a hand over your collarbone, dipping to the line of your chest through your thin brassiere. When your nipples harden at the brush of her palm, she lets out a soft, musical laugh.

“Columbina,” says Signora, surprisingly gentle, and she pulls back, but still hovers closer than she has been before. You have the unnatural sense of being watched, far closer and more intensely by Columbina than she was when she was by the Marionette. Sandrone, for her part, does not seem to want to be left behind, and she stands too so that the three of them bracket you in, a loose half-circle around where Arlecchino has you straddling her thigh. The Knave gives a little chuckle.

“See?” Arlecchino murmurs. “They can’t resist. Shall we give them a show?”

“I don’t . . . understand . . .” Your voice is a helpless thing, when you can feel the pleasant curls of heat low in your belly that remind you of how lovely you find every lady Harbinger, how enjoyable it is to be viewed as something pretty. Arlecchino’s hand brushes lower, lower, over the soft curve of your stomach and onto the plain cotton of your underwear.

“Shh,” she murmurs in response. “I won’t hurt you. None of us will. At least . . . not in any way you won’t enjoy.”

A rush of heat; those dark-tipped fingers, so much like claws, slipping past the waistband of your underwear. You let out a heated gasp as they stroke over your pubic mound and then lower, lower, slipping between the plump lips of your sex to the slick heat between.

“Speak for yourself,” Signora says, her voice husky. “I think that something that’s been hiding their loveliness from us for so long deserves a touch of punishment. Perhaps a spanking?”

You practically quiver under the idle threat combined with Arlecchino’s fingers, as they continue to slide between your thighs and map out the length of your slit. You’re aware of just how hot you are; the warmth and the wetness all at once making you feel dizzy. And the thought of being spanked--

“I said that they wouldn’t enjoy,” Arlecchino says mildly. “Judging by how they feel here . . .” Arlecchino punctuates her sentence with the briefest brush of fingers over the swollen button of your clit, “that’s not something they’re entirely against.”

“Take off their underwear,” Sandrone orders, imperious. “I can’t see.”

“My Lord Arlecchino--”

The Knave presses a kiss to the side of your head and you go all-over useless, your limbs melting under the brief moment of affection. It is so difficult to find anyone who is truly thankful to you in your line of work – anybody who really appreciates what you do. Would it be so bad, to let yourself be used by these women who already seem so much more appreciative of your presence than you’ve encountered in months?”

“I think we can oblige, don’t you?” She asks, her voice very warm and low like liquid honey, and you find yourself nodding in agreement as if hypnotised – letting her urge you onto your feet for a moment, off her thigh, in order to pull the sodden garment down your thighs and off your legs and onto the floor. “This too, I think--” And then you are divested, too, of your brassiere, your nipples standing to stiff attention in the room before them all. Tight coils of embarrassment mixed with arousal seem to keep them hard, noticeable to every woman in the room. Signora practically coos to see you standing there like this.

You dither for a moment, but are quickly pulled back onto Arlecchino’s lap – albeit in an entirely different position to the one you were in before.

Your thighs spread wide, your feet hooked behind her ankles, your back pressing against Arlecchino with one arm wrapped around your waist. In this position, there is no shying away – your thighs are forced wide, the lips of your sex open and displaying your clit and your entrance and just how wet you’ve allowed yourself to get from Arlecchino’s touch. Your chest heaving in soft little pants.

“There,” Arlecchino says, with more than a touch of the smugness about her – and then she reaches between your legs, delving between your thighs, and uses two finger to spread your lower lips even further apart. “My. Messy little thing.”

Columbina tilts her head to the side and then says, in her soft, strange, musical voice;

“I can help.”

You don’t realise exactly what she’s going to do until she’s before you, and her fingers are brushing along your thighs with the most feather light of touches, and then she is sinking onto her knees. You almost buck against Arlecchino in alarm as you feel surprisingly cool breath against your heated sex, but the woman has you in too strong a grip to do anything but squirm a little.

“Don’t,” Columbina says, voice lilting. “Don’t worry. You just seem like you need to relax. I think you could do with some help.”

You don’t think this is one of the usual ways that a superior – for that is what every woman in this room is to you – helps a servant relax, but you find yourself unable to say much to that effect as Columbina leans in and you feel the cool, wet muscle of a tongue flick teasingly out to taste you.

You suck in a ragged breath, your mind warring with your body about everything that is currently happening to you. You cannot deny that Columbina’s tongue against your most private and intimate parts feels good; you should know, from her singing, that she is entirely aware of just how to use her tongue. And yet it does come as a surprise – just how much she takes to working that same tongue over you, the delicate flick of the tip against your clit, the sensation of her dragging the flat of it down the length of you.

The way she doesn’t seem to mind that your arousal is wetting her cheeks; the fact she keeps making soft little hums of pleasure as she does it. Despite the blindfold covering her eyes, it’s as if she knows every one of your weakest spots – every sensitive little nerve that has your body feeling like tiny jolts of electricity are ricocheting all over your skin.

Arlecchino’s breath hitches in her throat, too, as she watches Columbina’s head between your thighs. You cannot imagine what you look like to the assembled throng; all in disarray over one of superior’s lap with another of them between your legs, Arlecchino’s fingers still lewdly spreading you open so you can’t even try to get away from the exploring tongue.

She doesn’t go at it with aplomb; she takes her time lapping at you, as if you’re some new flavour she wants to take the time to enjoy. But your body does not agree with the idea of taking time, and you feel the way that hot curls of want seem to keep curling inside of you. Helplessly, you reach for the arms of the armchair you’re spread over, digging your fingers into the plush upholstery.

“Columbina,” comes a petulant voice, and you look up to see that Sandrone is staring at you both with her lip twisted to one side, as if she’s considering whether or not she wants to get involved in this – but despite that, her hands are fisted in her dress and there’s a layer atop her words, a kind of breathlessness you didn’t realise an artificial body could create, that suggests she’s being rather flustered by the show. “If you go at it like that, you’ll never achieve any results!”

Columbina’s mouth pulls off your sex with a luridly wet pop, and you go hot again to see the way her delicate tongue flicks out to clean the wet droplets of your arousal still painting her lips.

“Oh?” Columbina asks, with only the slightest tilt of her head and a smile still on her face. “Isn’t the process just as enjoyable?”

Sandrone huffs out a noise of outrage and frustation.

“Of course you would think that,” she seethes, and she, too, moves towards you. She nudges Columbina aside with her foot and – much to your surprise – sinks down to join her on her knees. She takes a moment to look at you (and oh, you’re so terribly aware of the way Arlecchino is spreading your sex apart, so that she can see exactly how wet you are, exactly how it feels as though your clit is pulsing under the scrutiny).

“Sandrone,” Arlecchino says, and though her voice is mild there’s something that’s almost a warning – Sandrone looks at you again, and rolls her eyes.

“Alright,” she says, with a sigh. “I won’t hurt either. I just want to show our Moon Maiden how she should have gone about it if she wanted to get results—”

You let out a faltering noise as Sandrone, business-like and ruthless, runs her finger down your slit. Making a pleased little noise at how wet she finds you, she rotates her wrist slightly, so that she can press a finger against your entrance and gently circle her thumb around the pulsing button of your clit. And then, with no more fanfare, she slides that finger inside of you.

You jerk, unused to the intrustion – but Sandrone clicks her tongue and Arlecchino makes a soft soothing noise against your ear and keeps you anchored against her.

“Don’t mind our Lady Sandrone,” she says, whisper-quiet like a secret. “She gets rather invested in her projects – if anything, you should feel honoured she’s finding you worthy of her attention.”

“That’s right,” Sandrone says, looking up, as she crooks her finger inside of you, testing the way you feel around her. Her thumb doesn’t stop the maddening circle of your clit. “You should thank me, I think!” She pulls the finger out and pumps it once or twice, in and out of you, before she puts another finger against your entrance and looks up at you expectantly.

Your mind feels like a mess of wires, all tangled up. You can’t deny that the feel of something inside of you is intoxicating; that Sandrone knows what she’s doing with the inexorable rotation of her thumb, that Columbina’s exploratory tongue has stoked a fire in you that you can’t ignore. But it still takes you a minute to puzzle around it, to let your own heavy tongue reply to the request for gratitude.

“Th-thank you, My Lady . . .?” You hazard, and Signora laughs. Everybody in the room must be able to hear how flustered you are and how out of it all of this attention is making you feel. You, too, can hear the breathiness in your words, the thickness in your throat – and as Sandrone slides her second finger inside of you, you release a whining, stuttering moan.

There’s the slightest stretch, of course – but there’s also a feeling of fullness that you’re entirely unfamiliar with, a kind of slight sting that makes you want to roll your eyes back in your head. Sandrone gives a little pleased ‘hmph’, before she once again sets to working those fingers in annd out of you, pumping slowly, mimicking the movements that you’d one day thought a man might do to you--

You would never have once imagined this particular situation. Even in the midst of it all, you can barely believe it’s happening – all four of these beautiful women, all so focused on you, on the noises you’re making and the reactions you’re giving them . . . Sandrone crooks her fingers inside of you again in a come-hither motion, and somehow it seems as though she brushes against some kind of switch in the hot, tight channel of your sex and you moan, louder and more wanton than any noise you’ve ever heard yourself make.

“I’m trying to concentrate,” Sandrone admonishes you, but there’s a smug pride in her voice as she continues to mercilessly work that new spot inside of you, forcing more shockwaves of pleasure forward. It’s . . . overwhelming, in the most primal of ways. To have Sandrone do this for you, her fingers curling and pumping, her thumb working over your clit now with more pressure. You can feel the muscles in your thighs jumping, your toes curling helplessly, your shoulders shaking.

“Don’t worry,” says Signora, and you can hear her smile even as your lashes flutter. “You can be as loud as you want, sweet thing. The rest of us don’t mind hearing you at all.”

A click of Sandrone’s tongue, but she doesn’t sound all that angry – she’s far too busy being pleased with herself, as helpless little whines and whimpers keep escaping from your mouth. The slick sound of her fingers pumping into you embarrasses you and thrills you all at the same time, and that feeling does nothing to quell the excitement you feel building up in you.

“That’s right,” Arlecchino coos. “Let go.”

“So soon?” Sandrone asks, but then she lets out a laugh and she seems to increase her speed to a point that almost seems inhuman, more machine than anything else – and that feeling you’ve felt building in you, that ball of heat and wanting, that need to do something without the knowledge of what it is . . . that all escapes you, all at once, and you come under Sandrone’s clever fingers.

Oh.

You do more than come.

Something about where she’s been stroking you and the pressure and the speed all comes together, and you feel something else inside of you break – and you feel a gush, fluid spilling forth from you, onto Sandrone’s fingers and onto Arlecchino’s lap and onto your own inner thighs.

You barely notice all of that, though. Far more pressing is the way that your orgasm seems to explode into being, the fireworks, the way it feels your body is being disassembled and then being put back together. Your thighs shake – and your mouth is moaning, whimpering, helplessly making noises into the heated air.

She carries on through your orgasm, though she does at least have the decency to slow down, to help you over the peaks of your release with stroking, gentler fingers. She waits for your breath to almost even out, before she slowly, slowly pulls her fingers out of you.

She looks down at those fingers and shakes her head, making a click of displeasure with her tongue.

“You’ve made a mess,” she tells you, as smug as before – but then Signora laughs from her place.

“Then have the sweet little thing clean you up,” she says, and a hot flush climbs up the back of your neck – but Sandrone smiles sweetly and stands up and then places her fingers in front of your lips, wet and glistening with your ow slick.

“With your tongue,” Sandrone says. “Be good, now.”

You’re hesitant as you do it – but you do it even so, almost enjoying the thrill of how corrupt it makes you feel, to move your head forward and envelope Sandrone’s fingers within the warm, wet cave of your mouth. She’s clearly not expecting you to be so eager about it, either – when she feels your tongue hesitantly probing against the finger joints, she lets out a shaky breath as she waits for you to finish.

She pulls her hand back and tries to gather up her poise again, and with a little sniff she says;

“Well. I suppose . . . that was very nice.”

Columbina laughs, and then the Damselette is at Sandrone’s shoulder again, placing her delicate hand upon the other Harbinger’s own and pulling her back. As they retreat a little further into the room, you swear you see Columbina press a fleeting kiss to the corner of Sandrone’s mouth--

“Oh my,” says Signora, smiling at you. “It seems I didn’t get to go first after all. What a terrible pity.” Her uncovered eye gleams. “Still – I suppose that it means I get to do something a little different. After all – you’ve gotten to come, haven’t you? Been happy to be the receiver? I daresay it’s about time for you to try giving.”

“My lady?” You warble, unsure of what she means – but Arlecchino makes a noise of agreement, and she lets her arm around your waist ease off and gently assists you to stand on shaky legs, like a fawn taking its first steps.

Signora laughs.

“Oh, how cute.” She turns and walks purposely towards the sofa, where she comfortably settles herself – and then she takes the hem of her nightgown in her elegant fingers and pulls it up around her waist, bunching up the fabric behind her so that her legs and her thighs and the tempting golden pale hair at the vee of those thighs is revealed. She heaves a soft sigh and pleasure and then, stretching like a cat, parts her thighs so that you can see her own sex between them, pink and glistening in the firelight. “Look what you’ve done to me. The least you could do is come and do something about it.”

“H-how, My Lady?” You whisper, though your mouth has gone dry at the sight of her, so beautiful and statuesque and entirely at ease. Signora laughs aloud once more.

“Why, Columbina’s already done it for you and you don’t have an inkling at all of what I might want you to do with your pretty mouth?”

You take back what you thought about your mouth going dry before – because now it is a Sumeru desert.

“I . . . you would allow me to do that?” You whisper, and Arlecchino stands too. She places a gentle hand in the middle of your lower back and pushes you forward.

“Oh, sweetness,” Signora purrs. “I’d be getting even more out of it. Think of it as . . . repayment for me having the forethought to summon such a pretty maid to the tea party. Come get on your knees for me, hmm?”

You don’t know if you would have been able to do it – to gather up enough courage to walk over there and dare to put your mouth upon a Harbinger – if it hadn’t been for Arlecchino, walking with you. She gently pushes down on your shoulder once you’re there, and as you sink to your knees she takes a seat beside Signora, pulling the other woman’s thigh onto her lap.

Signora makes a soft noise of pleasure not unlike a cat’s, and then wraps her hand around the back of Arlecchino’s head to pull her into a kiss that makes your heart hammer in your chest, it’s so full of sensuality and hunger. Arlecchino kisses her back, hungry for the other woman’s mouth, her teeth tugging at the plump fullness of Signora’s bottom lip. When they separate, both of them have half-lidded, wanting eyes as they look down at you.

“Isn’t that cute on you,” Signora purrs, and she places a hand loosely on the top of your head, fingertips tangling in your hair. “Don’t be shy now. I’m sure you’ll be an expert in no time.”

It still requires determination to breach that final gap. You can smell Signora on the air; sweet and slightly musky, something that makes you fair dizzy with wanting. Her fingers pet through your hair again, as she coos sweetly at you and you finally manage to bring forth the courage to put your mouth on her.

She’s so beautiful. Stately and graceful and above you – and yet here you are, about to do this for her, after she’s said so many sweet things about you . . .

Your tongue hesitantly reaches out, lapping against her heated core. She tastes sweet, a slight tang at the back of your mouth, but far from unpleasant – and as your tongue moves against her, she lets out a pleased sigh, shifting just so in order for you to be able to access her sex better. She rests her head on the back of the sofa with a pleased ‘mmm’ noise, and you notice that Arlecchino is drawing patterns with her fingers on Signora’s bare thigh.

Emboldened by the reaction, this time you flick the tip of your tongue against the slightly hidden pearl of Signora’s clit, and the woman gives a little thrust of her hips forward to encourage you to repeat the motion again. You do exactly what you think she’s guiding you to do and lick and suck at her clit, and you’re encouraged with sighs of pleasure and breathy little moans that make that ache low between your own thighs return.

“You could try sucking on it,” says Arlecchino, and you briefly glance up from below your lashes to see that she’s resting her head against Signora’s neck and chest, gazing down at you with those strange eyes and hunger in the set of her mouth like a wolf looking at a tender morsel.

You follow her advice, gently sucking the swollen bud (peeking out from beneath the hood now) into your mouth and sucking gently on it, and Signora’s hands tighten in your hair almost painfully. She groans, chest-deep, and then she adds her own voice to the advice though hers sounds more like an order:

“Don’t stop doing that.”

With such clear instructions, how could you possibly ignore her? You continue to suck on it, feeling it almost twitch in your mouth, the way that she keeps her legs apart even though she clearly wants to press them either side of your head and pull you in. Harbingers don’t get where they are by not having self-control, you suppose.

“Next time we’ll teach you how to use your fingers too,” you hear, a whisper behind you, and you realise that Columbina and Sandrone have come to join in. You think, from the sound of their voice, they’ve settled back onto the large pillows on the floor – but the far more pressing matter is in your mouth.

“I won’t be long,” Signora sighs, tilting her hips up even more. Her voice shakes and shudders. “Mm . . . you have no idea what watching you being worked over did to me--”

You double your attack on her, the thought of being the person who makes the Fair Lady come sending frissons of excitement all through you again. You let go of her clit for a moment to give more eager laps of her cunt, up and down, over and over, her sweet slick coating your tongue. You pay particular attention, though, to her clit – to keep going back, over and over.

And only partly because the insistent hand in your hair keeps dragging you back to it. You flick your tongue over it, an ache in the root of the organ because of how hard you’re trying – and then you feel it. Where your chin is practically buried in the softness of her sex, her entrance pulses once, then twice against you--

And Signora whines aloud, she finally gives in the urge to wrap her thighs around your face, a slippered foot digging into your back, and pulls you in to keep licking and sucking at her as she rides out the heated waves of her orgasm, soaking your cheeks, pulsing against you with hungry moans and the flex of those strong, lithe thighs.

By the time her shaking and groaning is done, and her thighs have released their hold on you to settle lazily back on the sofa, feet on the floor. She gazes at you, sleepy and sated, every inch a beautiful house cat.

Your gaze flickers nervously to the last woman in the room. You’re suddenly aware that, once again, there’s a pounding between your own legs that feels like a second heartbeat.

“Lord Arlecchino?” You whisper, shyly, your mouth still wet from Signora’s recent release. “Do . . . is there anything I can do for you?”

Signora lets out an amused laugh. Arlecchino looks at you, consideringly – it is not exactly a kind look, but you feel warmed by it even so.

“Our Knave prefers to play with toys,” Signora says. “And we hadn’t had enough time to procure them for this little soiree. Still . . . I daresay she’d very much like to play with you again. Don’t you think?” She addresses the last question to Arlecchino, who now gives a little smile to the other woman.

“Very much,” Arlecchino says. “I don’t think you’ve been nearly filled up enough tonight. Ah. One makes do, though.” She leans forward and brushes her dark-tipped thumb over your cheek, down to the corner of your mouth to wipe an errant droplet of slick from it. “I’m sure we’ll call on you again. Still. Until then . . . I think you ought to put your uniform back on. Someone from the palace is probably missing you.”

You can tell immediately. The careful version of BB—the one who reads the seven in real time and adjusts, who treats your body like an instrument he's learning to play lovingly—that version is not here tonight. What's here instead is the drive, the thing underneath, the patient ancient hunger given permission to take what it wants, and what it wants is depth.

The first real thrust knocks the breath out of you. Deep, grinding, his hips rolling forward with a force that slides your knees an inch across the blanket, and the ridged texture of him—he hasn't bothered with the smooth human surface, he hasn't bothered with any pretence at all—drags against your inner walls in a long rippling wave that makes your vision narrow.

You moan, arching into the sensation. "Oh—"

"Yeah." His hand slides up your spine. Into your hair. His fingers gather the damp weight of it, gentle, then firm, tilting your head up from the blanket just enough that you can breathe properly. "Yeah, baby. I got you. Just hold on."

BB fucks you with slow, heavy strokes that use the full length of him, pulling back until you're whimpering at the wet drag and then grinding forward until the depth of him is pressing against places that make your eyes roll and your hands fist in the blanket and your mouth open on sounds you can't control.

And he's trembling.

You feel it first through his hand in your hair, a fine vibration in BB's fingers, not quite a shake, more like the hum of a wire pulled taut.

Then through his hips where they press against you at the apex of each stroke, the muscle of his thighs quivering. Then through the harmonic, which is not the steady controlled hum you know but something broken open, stuttering, catching on itself like a record skipping.

That purr-register gone ragged.

BBis inside you and he's overwhelmed, and the trembling is the body's way of trying to contain what is running through it, and it's failing.

"Baby—" his voice cracks, ragged on a moan, the Bobby-drawl fraying, "—baby, you feel— I can't—you're so—"

He can't finish the sentence. He gives up on the sentence. He gives up on language entirely and makes a sound instead. Low, wrecked, pulled up from somewhere underneath the Bobby-shape, somewhere old and wordless, and his hips snap forward harder and you keen.

Your elbows give.

A slow buckling, your arms folding under you as the force of him drives you forward and down, your breasts pressing to the blanket, your cheek turning against the soft pile of it.

You try to hold the position. Your knees are still under you, hips still raised, the angle still presenting, but the next stroke is deep, deeper than the last, and the one after that is deeper still, and your knees slide backward and your hips sink and then you're flat, prone, belly-down on the blanket with the warm weight of him following you down.

BB covers you.

His chest to your back, the cool-going-warm length of him draped over you, his mouth at your ear, his hand still in your hair, and the angle has changed—god, the angle has changed—the downward position tightening everything. The pressure of the blanket under your hips tilts your pelvis just enough that every stroke grinds the ridged length of him across the spot the seven have been guarding for months.

"BB—"

The name hits him like a hand on a bell. His whole body shudders.

Full shudder, crown to heel, the trembling cresting into a wave, and the harmonic pours out of him uncontrolled. Not the purr anymore but the deeper thing, the frequency, the one that vibrates through the floor and the walls and the warm pile of the nest and through your sternum. The seven sing back and the resonance between his body and yours and the seven becomes a single humming chord and you're flying apart from the inside—

"More," you choke into the blanket, moaning loudly into the blankets. "More, BB, I need—more—"

He whines in response.

A high, thin sound you have never heard him make before, and his hips stutter against you and you feel him shift.

The cock lengthens inside you. You feel it happen: the deliberate stretch of him reaching deeper, the ridges multiplying, the girth thickening by fractions, and the shift is not sudden. It's rolling. The shape of him rewriting itself to fill you fuller while he's still moving, and the sensation of being reshaped from the inside by a thing that is reshaping itself to match is—

You cry out.

Your hands claw at the blanket. Your face wet, tears soaking into the soft pile under your cheek, and the pleasure has gone past the point where it's a distinct sensation and become a state. A condition, a thing your whole body is doing, every nerve firing in tandem, the seven blazing so bright they're almost tangible—

"I know," BB slurs against your ear. His lips are on the hinge of your jaw, his breath coming fast and uneven, the careful human rhythm of it abandoned. "I know, baby, I know, it's—it's so much, I know, but I need—just a little—just a little deeper, sweetheart, just—there—"

He presses deeper. You sob, clawing at the sheets.

"Just like that," he whispers, shaking. "Just like—oh—just like that, you're perfect, you're so perfect, you're so so perfect, baby, I can feel you. I can feel all of you—the seven are—they're singin' so loud, sweetheart, you should hear what you sound like from the inside."

His hand in your hair tightens. An anchor for both of you. His forehead drops to the back of your neck and his mouth is open against your skin and you can feel the harmonic coming out of him in waves now.

Not a hum anymore but a keen, the eldritch version of the sound you're making, and the two sounds layer and braid and the nest hums with the combined frequency and the lamp pulses and you feel the warm curtain-light flicker across your closed eyelids.

"BB—BB, I can't—it's too much, it's—"

Your voice breaks and you hiccup over the sound.

"I know." His voice is rough. Barely there. Slurring on the vowels, the consonants dissolving. "I know it is, baby, I know, I'm sorry, I just—you feel so good. I need to feel you, I need—just a little more, just—please—you feel so—I've never—nothin' has ever—"

He can't finish.

BB gives up on trying to finish. He buries his face in the crook of your neck and his hips roll into you. He's not thrusting anymore, not the sharp deep strokes of a minute ago, but a grind. His pelvis sealed flush against you and the full ridged length of him working in slow, devastating circles against the deepest place he can reach, and the texture of him is dragging against every nerve you have in a continuous rolling wave that doesn't crest and doesn't ebb.

It doesn't give you a single second to breathe between one pulse of sensation and the next.

Your mouth hangs open, your fingers clenched in the blanket to hold on.

Tears run freely now, soaking into the soft pile under your cheek, and the pleasure has crossed some threshold you didn't know existed. Past the point where your body can process it as discrete sensation, past the point where the peaks are distinguishable from the valleys, into a place where it is just one thing. One continuous roaring note, your entire nervous system lit up and screaming and the seven are amplifying every single second of it.

And the seven are doing something they've never done before.

The feedback loop is open, wide open, all seven gates singing at full volume, and they're not just catching your pleasure and passing it to BB anymore, they're catching it, passing it to him, receiving his version back, amplifying it, and feeding it back to you.

And the amplified version hits your nervous system and produces more pleasure and the seven catch that and the loop accelerates—

Your vision goes white at the edges.

The warm amber curtain-light blurs and bleaches and for a terrifying, gorgeous second you cannot see anything at all. You're just sensation, just the grinding pressure of BB thrusting inside you and the seven singing at a pitch that is vibrating your actual bones and the weight of him on your back and the wet heat of his mouth on your neck, kissing and licking and sucking, and the harmonic pouring through your sternum and you are—you're going to—

"BB—" it comes out thin, desperate, slurred, "BB, I'm—I think I'm gonna—I can't see—"

"I got you." Immediate. Even wrecked, even shaking, even slurring, immediate. BB's arm tightens around your ribs. The grind slows by a fraction. Not quite stopping, he cannot stop, but easing just enough that the seven pull back from the screaming edge by one degree. "I got you, sweetheart, I'm here, I'm not lettin' you go anywhere. Stay with me. Stay right here. Just feel me."

You gasp, trying to nod as it dissolves into a whimper. The white recedes. The amber comes back instead, blurred through tears. You can feel your heartbeat in your whole body, hammering, and the seven have eased from their shrieking peak into something that is still blinding but no longer threatening to take your consciousness with it.

"There we go," he breathes against your neck, kissing the damp line, pulsing inside you. "There you are, baby. Right here. My good girl. So good for me."

And then, because the drive is still running, because the feel of you clenching and fluttering around him in the aftermath of almost going under is apparently more than he can take, BB's hips snap forward.

Hard. One sharp, deep thrust that punches the air out of you and buries him to the absolute limit of what the reshaped length can reach inside wit a wet squelch, and he stays, and grinds. That slow, devastating circles find the spot again and your body seizes around him.

You come with a violent flutter.

There's no crest. An avalanche. It takes you from the feet up, your toes curling, your calves locking, your thighs clamping around nothing because there's nothing to clamp around.

He's inside you and you're flat on the blanket and the only thing to do with this pleasure force is take it, and you scream into the pillow, a sound you did not know you could make, and the seven catch the scream and translate it and send it hurtling down the loop and—

BB snarls above you.

You feel the moment his body exceeds capacity. The trembling hits a frequency that's no longer trembling but vibrating, every molecule of the shape BB built shaking at a pitch that blurs the edges of him, and the harmonic doesn't just pour out of him, it erupts. A sound so deep and so vast that the walls of the nest bow outward like lungs filling and the blankets shudder and the curtain-light swings and somewhere in the corridor outside the room shifts.

BB comes inside you in a gush so powerful you sob, drool dripping from the corner of your mouth and into wrecked blankets below.

You feel the overflow.

The saturation point inside you reached and exceeded and the excess having nowhere to go but out.

What comes out is hot—hotter than he's ever been, the fever-warmth of him spiking past anything your body has memorised, the warm flood pouring into you in heavy pulses that the seven catch, each one, and hold.

It produces a secondary wave of pleasure in you that rolls through the first one and compounds it and your climax, which was already an avalanche, becomes a thing with aftershocks. Your body pulses around him in helpless clenches and flutters that you can't control and that BB can feel, each one, because the loop is still running.

Because the seven are still translating, because your pleasure is still becoming his pleasure is still becoming yours—

The loop runs for what feels like hours.

Peak feeding into peak feeding into peak, the two of you locked together prone on the blanket, his weight on you and his face buried in your neck, his arm a steel band around your ribs.

The seven sing so loud the sound becomes physical, a vibration you can feel in your teeth, in the small bones of your wrists. Your body is doing things without your input—clenching, releasing, clenching again, the involuntary rhythm of a nervous system in freefall, and every clench pulls another small sound out of BB, animal sounds, wrecked sounds, whines and gasps that have no Bobby left in them at all.

When the loop finally begins to slow by degrees, the peaks getting fractionally smaller, the spaces between them getting fractionally wider. Until the spaces are big enough to breathe in and you both breathe, a long shuddering simultaneous inhale that sounds like surfacing from deep water.

Your vision clears.

The amber comes back in full. The curtain-light steadies. The seven ease from their blinding chorus into a warm, steady hum that feels almost apologetic, like seven small fires banking themselves after nearly burning the house down.

He's still inside you, still shaking. The trembling hasn't stopped and you're starting to understand that it may not stop for a while. That what just moved through him was too large for the body and the body is still processing it the way a bell still rings after being struck.

"Baby," he manages. One word. The only word he can apparently find. His mouth shapes it into the crook of your neck like he's pressing it into your skin for safekeeping.

You try to answer. What comes out is a breath that might have been a laugh, and your hand finds his where it's clamped around your ribs and your fingers lace through his and you squeeze, once, because that's all you have.

One squeeze. I'm here. I felt it. I know.

BB squeezes back, his fingers trembling in yours.

You become aware of the mess slowly.

First the wet. You're lying in it.

The blanket beneath your hips is soaked. Warm and slick and too much, more than a human body could produce, because his is not a human body and what comes out of him does not obey human volume. It has pooled under you, gathered in the dip the weight of your hips has made in the nest, and when you shift even a fraction you feel the warm slide of it against your belly, your inner thighs, the crease where thigh meets hip.

Then the glow.

You almost miss it. Your face is still turned sideways on the pillow, eyes half-closed, lashes damp, and the amber curtain-light is soft enough that it takes a moment to separate one warm light from another.

But there—at the edge of your vision, where the blanket is darkest with mess of it—the faintest luminescence. Not bright. A soft bioluminescent shimmer in the slick of him, barely there, the palest gold-white, like something living at the bottom of a very deep ocean giving off its own light.

"BB," you whisper. "It's—it's glowing."

He makes a sound against your neck. A low rumble that vibrates through your spine, half-embarrassed, half-pleased, entirely spent.

He knows. He can feel it, the way he can feel everything that is still him regardless of where it is. The substance on the blanket, all the substance overflowing inside you, the seven rooted places. all of it still pulsing in the same slow diminishing rhythm, the tail end of the overflow settling into stillness.

BB's hand unlaces from yours. Slides down, slow, across your ribs, over the dip of your waist, and comes to rest low on your belly. His palm presses flat. Warm. Possessive in the old way, the way his hand always finds that place, but tonight there is intent in the pressure, a slow gentle push, and you feel it.

You feel him inside.

The cock is still seated deep, still hard. He doesn't soften the way human men soften. The refractory period is not installed, the body simply stays at whatever state of readiness he chooses, and right now he is choosing to stay full in you.

When his hand presses against your belly from the outside you become aware of the shape of him from both directions. The hard length of him inside, pressing against your front wall, and his warm palm outside, pressing toward it, and between the two pressures your belly becomes the held thing, the kept thing, and the sensation is so intimate it makes your breath catch.

BB rubs. Slow circles. Gentle, absent, the way he strokes the small of your back when you're standing in the kitchen.

Except now BB's hand is on the soft low curve of your belly and he's pressing just firmly enough that you can feel the ridge of him shift inside you with each pass. Feel the extra pressure push more of his release out of you, dripping down in a wet, thick gush.

Each circle pushes his cock a fraction of an angle, just enough that you feel it move, and the moving is not a thrust, it's not even sex, it's just... awareness. Him making sure you know he's still there, making sure you can feel the full shape of what is still inside you, hard and pulsing and present.

You're ruined, a wreck. Your face, tear-streaked, and your thighs, trembling. You're lying in a puddle of faintly glowing come in a nest an eldritch entity built you out of love, and his hand is on your belly, and his cock is still inside you, and you're so far past okay you don't have the word for it.

BB's hand keeps rubbing. Slow circles, slow circles.

You close your eyes.

That's the thing you still can't quite get used to. The hum is different here. Not the flat, fluorescent drone of Level 0's hallways, that ambient pressure that sits on your skin like a low-grade headache. This is warmer. Rounder. A sustained note that lives in the walls the way heat lives in a radiator, and it fills the rooms, plural, with doors and corners and a kitchen with a window that faces a corridor that BB has done something to. 

Strange and inhuman, so that the light that comes through the glass looks like late afternoon in the Santa Clara Valley, even though there is no afternoon here and no valley and no sun.

BB built this for you.

A hallway that hadn't existed. A doorway where a wall once stood. He carved a sublevel out of Level 0, the way you'd carve a space inside a block of wood, and what emerged was this: an apartment. Your apartment. Not a copy, not the uncanny almost-right, but a reconstruction built from the details he absorbed through the wall over months of listening and your own memories. The layout of the kitchen. The position of the bookshelves. The height of the counter where you used to lean while Bobby stood at the sink.

It's not identical. It can't be. Some details Backrooms can’t render right, some he interpreted rather than reproduced, and there are places where his understanding of home and yours diverge in ways that are quietly alien. The windows don't open. The bathroom has no mirror. The bookshelves are organised by colour, the way you described to him once, and seeing your preference rendered in physical space by something that remembered a passing comment had made your throat tight in a way you couldn't name.

He started building it after the agents.

You don't like thinking about the attack. Your body remembers it better than your mind does. 

You remember the impact. The floor. A pressure on your chest that felt unbearable, like the air itself had solidified, and a pain in your shoulder that burned white and erased thought. You remember voices—clipped, tactical, coordinated, the language of people who had trained for this—and then BB's arrival.

You don't remember what happened to the agents. BB recounted what happened later, in clipped sentences, his jaw tight, his eyes carrying a darkness that took hours to fully recede, that there had been six. Human. Armed. Organised in a way that suggested training and resources, and a purpose that went beyond casual exploration. The encounter had been resolved.

He didn't elaborate on resolved. You didn't ask.

After that, BB locked Level 0 down. You felt it happen even as you clung to him after the attack, a shift in the hum, a tightening, like a fist closing around the entire level. 

The corridors that used to carry the occasional lost wanderer, the stray explorer who stumbled in from Level 1 and stumbled out again, are now sealed. Thresholds that had been porous became walls. Doors that had been doors became surfaces. BB walked the perimeter for three days straight, and when he came back, his eyes were fully black, and the warmth took a long time to return, and the message was absolute: nothing gets in. 

Nothing human, nothing inhuman, nothing with a weapon and a tactical vocabulary and the coordinates to find the corridor where you bled on the floor. Level 0 was his. Level 0 was yours. And the only things moving through it now were the two of you and the hum and whatever BB decided to allow, which was nothing, which was no one, which was the total and permanent closure of a territory around the person inside it.

You healed. Your lip closed over, your bruises receded. BB fussed over you, his face tight with concentration that you gradually recognised as fear. Not fear of the wound. Fear of what the wound meant. That you could be reached. That the corridors he'd taught you to walk and the levels he'd shown you and the notebook full of careful shorthand hadn't been enough to keep a human with a weapon from putting you on the ground in a place he'd told you was safe.

He'd been different since. Not colder, exactly, the warmth was still there, the hand on yours, the chin on your shoulder while you sketched. But warier. His attention, already vast, had developed a new layer, a peripheral vigilance that never fully shut off, a constant low-level scanning that you could feel the way you felt the hum. 

He checked the corridors before you entered them now. He checked rooms you'd been in a hundred times. And he'd built this place—the sublevel, the apartment, the nest within the nest—and the message was clear even if he never said it aloud. Deeper. More hidden. Harder to reach. A space carved into the architecture of Level 0 itself, tucked beneath his territory the way a vital organ sits beneath the ribs.

You've been here a while. 

Long enough that the first notebook is full and the second is two-thirds gone and the third is waiting on the shelf BB just stacked, its mottled cover still crisp. 

Long enough that you've mapped Level 0 in its entirety, or as close to entirety as a place like this gets, and made partial notes on multiple other levels. Some detailed, some no more than a page of warnings and a rough sketch. It’s been long enough that your handwriting has changed. Gotten smaller, tighter, more efficient, conserving space the way you conserve everything here. 

And long enough that the thing on the perimeter has become a permanent entry in the notebook. Updated weekly, the symbol you invented for it—a circle with a line bisecting it, unknown entity, behaviour unclassified—appearing on more pages than any other annotation.

It's still circling. Still testing. Running its vast, patient intelligence along the boundary of BB's territory and pulling back before contact. You've taken to calling it Entity X in your notes permanently, a placeholder designation, because giving it a real name would make it more solid, and it's already solid enough. 

You can feel it sometimes. Not the way you feel the hum or BB's presence, but as an absence, a hot spot at the edge of perception, like turning your head toward a sound that stopped just before you heard it.

BB doesn't talk about it.

That's how you know it's bad. BB talks about Smilers with contempt and Howlers with mild annoyance, and the locked-down perimeter with the grim satisfaction of a thing that sealed its borders and dares anything to test them. He talks about the agents with a clipped exactness that betrays how much it shook him. 

But Entity X gets silence. Gets the jaw-tightening. Gets the moments you've started cataloguing in a private section of the notebook that you don't label. The mornings when he's already awake when you surface, sitting at the edge of the nest with his posture too rigid and his eyes too dark, focused on a distance you can't perceive. The nights he disappears and comes back with the face not quite set, the edges sharp, the wet-paint quality that means he dropped Bobby to deal with whatever he found and hasn't fully climbed back in yet. He smooths over it. Deflects. Does the half-grin and the shrug and the it's handled that you've learned to read as I don't want you to carry this.

You let him think it works. You watch him reassemble his composure over breakfast, and you don't push. You don't pry. You simply add another entry to the private section, which is getting longer. The circle-with-a-line symbol fills the margins like a recurring dream.

Long enough that the thought of leaving has shifted from a wound to a question.

You think about it. Still. Not every day—not the way you did in the beginning, when it was a constant screaming pressure behind your ribs—but in the quiet moments, the ones between mapping and walking and BB's hand on yours. In the pauses. You'll be sketching a corridor junction, and your pen will stop, and you'll look at the lines on the page and think: I could navigate this now. 

Not all of it. Not the deep levels, not the places BB won't take you. But the paths between 0 and 1, between 1 and the threshold levels, the routes that thread through the safer territories. You know them. You've walked them, mapped them in your own shorthand and committed the landmarks to memory. You’re no longer the woman who fell through a wall and couldn't find her way back. You could find your way back. Probably. If you wanted to.

If you wanted to.

The if is the problem.

The if sits in your chest like a stone, and you can feel its weight when you breathe, and you don't examine it too closely because examining it means confronting what's underneath. That the woman who fell through the wall wanted to go home with a desperation that burned, and the woman standing in a reconstructed kitchen organising shelves with an ancient entity is not sure she does anymore. Not because home stopped mattering. Because here started mattering too.

You feel loved here.

The admission lives in the back of your skull like a low-grade fever, always present, never quite articulated. 

You feel loved. BB needed you before he loved you, or whatever the equivalent is for a being that predates human emotional language. But loved, in the clear, daily, accumulative way that love manifests when it's not grand gestures and declarations but shared laughter and proximity and a hand that finds yours in the dark without being asked. BB loves you pervasively, from every direction at once. And you’ve started to love him back, and the loving feels like betrayal, and the betrayal feels like breathing, and you can't tell anymore which one you're supposed to stop.

It's selfish. You know it's selfish. Somewhere on the other side of the wall there's a world you belonged to, a life with your name on it, and you're standing in a facsimile kitchen letting an inhuman thing shelve your notebooks and you're happy, or close enough to happy that the difference doesn't register, and the selfishness of that—choosing comfort over confrontation, choosing the being who stayed over the man you'd have to face—sits in your stomach like acid.

You don't say any of this. You lean against the kitchen counter, and you watch him arrange the shelf and try not to notice the tension he thinks he's hiding.

It's in his hands. The notebooks are stacked neatly, but his fingers linger on each spine a fraction too long before releasing, and there's a quality to BB’s movements—too measured, too controlled—that you've learned to recognise as the aftermath of a bad patrol. 

He'd been out this morning. Before you woke. You'd surfaced to find the nest empty, and you'd lain there tracing the impression of his body in the fabric and counting the minutes until the hallway produced him again. And when it did, his face was smooth, and his smile was easy. He'd said morning, baby with the half-grin. You'd said morning, and neither of you mentioned that his eyes were still a shade too dark, that the blue was slow in rising, that whatever he'd encountered at the perimeter was still sitting behind his expression like sediment that hadn't fully settled.

He's protecting you from it. The way he shields you from the worst of the corridor checks, the way he smooths Entity X into a vague it's fine, it's the same, nothing's changed whenever you ask directly. He carries it alone because carrying it is what he does, because shielding you is coded into whatever he is at a level deeper than the face, and the tenderness of that instinct and the frustration of being managed by it exist in equal measure inside your chest.

You watch his hands on the shelf. You watch the tension he thinks is invisible. 

The hum holds you both in its warm, low frequency, and somewhere from the apartment, the music starts.

A crackle of static first, the particular pop and hiss of a record that's been played too many times, and then the melody. Slow. Sweet. Old in a way that feels intentional, like the Backrooms reached into the past and pulled out the exact song designed to make your chest ache.

We'll meet again, don't know where, don't know when—

Vera Lynn. The voice is warm and rounded and impossibly clear for a moment, every note landing clean, and then the Backrooms stutter—a glitch, a skip, the audio hiccupping like a record needle jumping a groove—and the word when stretches, distorts, hangs in the air a fraction too long before the melody catches up to itself and continues.

—but I know we'll meet again some sunny day—

Another glitch. The word sunny fractures, splits into overlapping copies of itself that pile up for half a second (sunny sunny sun-n-ny) and then resolves, the song smoothing back out like water closing over a dropped stone. The crackle persists underneath. A warmth to the distortion, like listening to a broadcast from very far away, like the song is travelling through miles of wall and wire and yellow to reach you.

You go still.

Your hand rests on the counter. The song fills the apartment, and you feel yourself drift. Not physically. Internally. The song pulls at the room in the back of your chest, the one where the Thursday morning lives, the one where Bobby said stay and the sheets were gold, and the phone rang, and he ignored it because his mouth was on yours.

Keep smiling through, just like you always do—

A skip. Always repeats, layers, becomes a brief chorus of itself before the record unsticks and Vera Lynn carries on, serene, unruffled, singing about reunion to a woman standing in a place where reunion might be impossible.

You stare at the window. The fake Santa Clara light falls across your hands on the counter, and it's warm, it's exactly the right warmth, and the song is playing, and you are thinking about the front door of your real apartment, the one with the sticky lock that Bobby always meant to fix. The sound your keys made when you set them on the table by the door. Whether anyone has fixed the lock since you've been gone, or whether it's still sticky, waiting for your hand on the knob, waiting for you to come home and jiggle it the way only you knew how—

“Hey.”

BB's voice. Close. You blink. He's in front of you—when did he move?—and his head is tilted, his eyes searching your face. That total-attention read, line by line. He sees where you went. He always sees it. He can track the exact moment your gaze goes internal, the instant when the woman in front of him leaves the room, and the woman who misses Bobby takes her place.

He doesn't ask. He doesn't say are you thinking about him or do you want to talk about it or are you okay. He does something else instead.

He holds out his hand.

Palm up. Fingers open. The same gesture he made at the old nest, except the context has shifted, the weight of it is different now, heavier, more layered. 

His eyes are warm, and his mouth is soft. Vera Lynn sings through the walls and glitching on the word again (a-a-again), and BB stands in a kitchen he built for you with his hand extended, and the look on his face says come here, come back, I know where you just went, and you don't have to stay there.

You seize his hand in yours.

He pulls you in. Gently. Your chest against his. His hand settles at the small of your back. Low, warm, the heel of his palm resting against the base of your spine, and his other hand keeps yours, lifting it, positioning your joined hands at shoulder height, the way you showed him.

You've been teaching BB to dance.

It started as a joke, a throwaway comment about how Bobby had two left feet and you'd tried to teach him once. He'd stepped on your toes, called dancing vertical suffering, and refused to try again. 

BB had tilted his head. Asked questions. And the next evening, he'd stood in the middle of the living room with his arms stiff and his weight wrong and said show me, and you'd laughed but taken his hands and spent an hour teaching him a basic box step while he moved with the mechanical precision of something that had studied human motion extensively and participated in it never.

He's better now. Not fluid, not quite natural, still carrying that faint quality in his movements, the angles a half-degree too clean, but better. He can hold the frame. He can follow the tempo. Can move you through the small kitchen space without stepping on your feet.

'Til the blue skies drive the dark clouds far away —

The song glitches. Dark clouds becomes d-dark cl-clouds, a stutter that sounds like the record is caught in a groove, cycling, and then it releases, and the melody continues, and BB turns you slowly in the kitchen light.

You look up at him.

He's looking down at you. Bobby's face, close, the chain at his throat catching the warm not-sunlight, the earring a small bright point at the edge of your vision. His expression is—

You've run out of words for BB's expressions. The early ones had names: Bobby's grin, Bobby's smirk, Bobby's mock-wounded outrage. But BB has been building his own vocabulary of expressions on top of Bobby's, small deviations from the blueprint, micro-adjustments that belong to him and only him, and the one on his face right now is entirely his.

He smiles at you.

Small. Crooked. Genuine.

Bobby's grin was a performance, a weapon, a thing deployed with intent. This is quieter. Lopsided. One corner of his mouth lifting slightly higher than the other, the asymmetry creating warmth. It's the smile of a thing that learned to smile by watching a man smile and then, slowly, over months, forgot to copy and started to mean it.

You gaze at each other.

BB's hand is warm at your back, and your hand is in his, and you're standing close enough that you can see the individual lashes framing his eyes, dark against the blue, and the small scar on his jaw, and the way the not-sunlight catches the fine grain of his skin. Which is perfect. Which is too perfect, and has no imperfections except the ones he chose to replicate, and even those are too intentional, the blemishes of a face that was designed rather than grown.

You should look away. The tension is building in the space between your bodies the way static builds before a storm, and you should look away because looking at BB like this, in this light, with this song, is a door you're not sure you can close once you walk through it.

You don't look away.

BB's gaze drops.

To your mouth.

It's not subtle because BB doesn't do subtle. His eyes fix on your lips and stay there, and you can feel the weight of it, the physical pressure of being looked at that intently by something that ancient. Like a beam of light concentrated through a lens until it burns.

His breathing changes.

He doesn't need to breathe. You know this. You've known it for a while. The breathing is performance, a courtesy, a piece of the human costume he maintains because the alternative would unsettle you. But right now, in the kitchen, with his eyes on your mouth and the song glitching softly around you (we'll meet a-a-again), his chest expands and contracts, the air leaving him in a slow, uneven exhale, pushed out rather than released. Like whatever is happening inside him right now is too large for the shape to hold without venting pressure.

“Can I—” he starts.

Stops.

BB’s jaw twitches, that muscle at the hinge. His eyes are still on your mouth, and his hand tightens at your back. A fraction, barely perceptible, his fingers pressing into the fabric of your shirt, and his throat moves. A swallow. Another borrowed gesture, another piece of human machinery he doesn't need, except right now it looks involuntary. It looks real.

“Can I,” he rasps again, even quieter. 

His voice has dropped into that low register, the one that carries the hum's harmonic underneath it. Not the ancient-thing voice. Or the vast, reverberating frequency he uses when something threatens his territory. This is… smaller. Almost shy. A resonance that sounds like it's coming from a place BB didn't know he had.

He trails off.

The kitchen is quiet. Vera Lynn has gone silent. The song caught in a glitch, a held note, the record spinning in a groove that won't release. Only sounds are the hum, BB's unnecessary breathing, and your own heartbeat, too loud in your ears.

"What do you want?" you ask, barely above a whisper. 

You can feel the tension in him through your palm on his shoulder. Not the coiled readiness he carries in dangerous corridors. A different kind. A vibration, running through the muscle and bone of a body that is not muscle and bone. That is something else entirely, wearing the shape of a man who is shaking because he wants something and doesn't know how to take it without being taught.

BB makes a sound.

Low. At the back of his throat. A sound that lives in the space between a groan and a hum, that carries a wanting so raw it barely fits through his vocal cords. Throaty. Needy. And underneath it—beneath the borrowed voice, beneath Bobby's timbre and the human costume—a vibration that is entirely and unmistakably other. Primal. 

His hand lifts from between your bodies. Unsure. His fingers drift upward, and his thumb finds your mouth. Presses against the swell of your bottom lip. Gentle. Barely there. The pad of his thumb traces the curve of it the way he traces the edge of a doorway when he's reading a room, with that same focused attention, that same reverent precision.

“A kiss,” he whispers.

His eyes lift from your mouth to your eyes. His thumb stays on your lip. The wanting on his face is so naked, so unperformed, so completely stripped of Bobby's armour and BB's composure that it makes your breath catch. 

“You taught me to dance,” he goes on, the words coming out unevenly. Hushed. His thumb moves against your lip, the faintest drag, back and forth, and his eyes are dark and wide. The ancient thing behind them is nowhere to be seen. What's looking at you is just BB, just the being you named in a meadow, wanting something human with a desperation that borders on heartbreaking. “Teach me this. Teach me how to—” His breath shudders. Not a performance, a malfunction. A system overwhelmed. “How to do it right. I want to do it right. For you.”

Your breath hitches.

The conflict is a living thing in your chest,  a creature with teeth and a heartbeat, pulling in two directions at once. 

Bobby's mouth on yours on a sunny morning. BB's thumb on your lip in a kitchen that shouldn't exist. The man who kissed you like he invented it, and the being who is asking permission to learn how to. The love you carried through the wall and the love that grew on this side of it, stubborn and impossible and real, and the guilt, the guilt, the guilt that says this is betrayal and the counter-voice that hisses betrayal of what? Of a man who grunted at your goodbye? Of a love that was already starving when you left?

You want this.

The wanting is its own answer. It sits in your stomach, hot and undeniable, and it doesn't care about the guilt, and it doesn't care about the conflict. It doesn't care that the mouth hovering near yours belongs to a thing that heard you through concrete and chose to wear the face of the man who broke your heart. 

You want this. You want him. BB. Not the face, or the copy, not the better version of someone else, but the thing underneath. The one who learned your name, kept your promise, built you a kitchen, and is standing in it now with his thumb on your lip, his body shaking, the word please forming on his tongue.

“Please,” he breathes, his thumb dragging across your bottom lip one more time. Feather-light. And his face is so soft, so open, so wrecked with the rawness of wanting something he's never had that the word comes out like a prayer. "Please."

You don't stop him when he leans in.

His lips brush yours.

The lightest possible contact. The surface tension of a kiss, the moment before it becomes one, and the touch is tentative. So fragile, and so different from every kiss you've ever experienced that your body doesn't know how to categorise it. 

Bobby kissed like he was claiming, savouring. BB kisses like he's asking, begging. His mouth hovers against yours, barely touching, a question held in the millimetre of space between his skin and yours, and you can feel the tremor in his lips. He's shaking. Fine, continuous, a vibration that you feel more than see, and his breath—the breath he doesn't need—washes over your mouth in a warm, unsteady exhale.

Then the contact lands. Full. His lips press to yours, and the sensation is—

Heat.

Beyond warmth, beyond the gentle building of a slow kiss. A current that slams through your entire system, starting at the point of contact and radiating outward through your jaw, your throat, your chest, and the base of your spine. It's not natural, it can't be natural, because the body against yours is not a body and the mouth on yours is not a mouth, not really. It's the surface expression of something vast and old and powerful, and that power is in the kiss, threaded through it like voltage through copper, and your nervous system lights up like a circuit completing.

BB is worse.

You feel it happen. His skin, always cool, always that slightly-below-human temperature that you've gotten used to, goes hot. A flush of warmth that starts at his mouth and spreads, radiant, through his jaw and his neck and the hands on your body. His cool skin warms beneath your lips like metal left in the sun. Like the contact between your mouth and his is generating a heat that his body was never designed to process.

He makes a sound against your mouth. Soft. Greedy. A small, desperate noise that vibrates between your lips, and he can't stop it. You can tell. Because you can feel the way his jaw tightens and his breath catches. Like he's trying to contain it and failing, the sound escaping anyway, involuntary, the noise of someone encountering sensation for the first time and being unmade by it.

You tilt your head. Change the angle. Show him.

He follows. Quick, eager, that same devouring attentiveness he brings to every lesson. Your angle becomes his angle, your pressure becomes his pressure, and the speed at which BB adapts is inhuman. Seconds instead of minutes, the learning curve of a thing that absorbs information through contact. 

Your lips part, just barely, and his mirrors the movement, and the kiss deepens, and BB's hand slides up your back and grips, bunching the fabric of your shirt between his fingers. The sound he makes this time is louder. A sigh that cracks open midway through and becomes a groan, low and shaking, shot through with that sub-harmonic frequency that you feel in your teeth.

His other hand finds the side of your face, cups your jaw. His thumb traces your cheekbone, and his mouth moves against yours. He's learning. You can feel him learning, cataloguing each shift in pressure, each tilt, each breath, mapping this the way you mapped his corridors, with hunger and the desperate focus.

You run your fingers through his hair. BB shudders. A full-body tremor, head to feet, and the sound he makes is a wrecked, bitten-off thing that lives somewhere between a gasp and a whimper, and his forehead drops against yours, and his mouth chases yours, his fingers tightening in your shirt.

When you finally part, his mouth follows yours. An inch. Reluctant. Not wanting the distance.

His forehead rests against yours. His breathing is ragged. Unnecessary, performative, and completely out of his control, great shuddering exhales that fog the negligible space between your faces. His eyes are closed. The lashes dark against his flushed skin, which is still warm, still radiating that unnatural heat, and his lips are parted, and his expression is—

Ruined. That's the word. He looks ruined. Taken apart at the joints and not yet reassembled. Every layer of composure stripped away. Bobby's armour, BB's own careful vaneer, the ancient thing's vast indifference. All of it gone, peeled back, and what's underneath is just this: a being, shaking, in a kitchen, with the taste of you on a mouth he built to say your name.

“Am I doing it right?” he whispers shakily, slightly dazed. “Was that good?”

His eyes open. Find yours. And the expression in them is so earnest. So genuinely concerned that the answer might be no, that he might have gotten it wrong. That the thing he wants more than anything he's ever wanted might be the thing he's worst at, that your chest cracks along an old fault line, warmth flooding in.

You smile. Your nose bumps his.

“You're a very eager student,” you murmur, your voice thick. Roughened. 

The heat still sits in your veins, humming through the places where his mouth was, and the words come out low and warm but certain.

BB's face transforms.

The worry dissolves. What replaces it is satisfaction. Feline. Deep. The slow, spreading pleasure of a thing that’s been told it succeeded at the one task it cared about. And the expression settles onto Bobby's features in a way that is entirely BB's. Not the cocky grin, but quieter, more private, enormously pleased, a contentment so total it rearranges his face into a shape Bobby never wore.

He leans in. Presses his lips to your forehead.

Gentle. Unhurried, lingering. His mouth is warm against your skin, and you feel the hum transfer through the contact. That low, steady vibration, his frequency, the sound that lives in his chest and translates through his mouth into a pulse that settles behind your sternum like a second heartbeat. 

He holds the kiss there. Two seconds. Three. His hand cradling the back of your head, his fingers in your hair, and the gesture is so tender and so completely his that the breath leaves your body in a long, slow exhale.

You close your eyes. Lean into it.

Bobby never used to kiss your forehead.

Bobby kissed your mouth, your neck, the spot below your ear that made you gasp. Bobby kissed with intent, heat, and skill. Bobby kissed like a man who knew exactly what he was doing and wanted you to know he knew. 

But the forehead—that quiet, unhurried, undemanding press of lips to the place above your eyes—that was never in Bobby's vocabulary. 

It was too tender. Too unperformative. Too much like a devotion and not enough like a statement. Bobby declared. And the soft devotional gesture of forehead to forehead, mouth to brow, the kiss that says I cherish you instead of I want you—that was always one of the doors Bobby bricked up, one of the tender things he couldn't do because doing it would've meant admitting the size of what he felt, and Bobby's whole life was an exercise in pretending the feeling was smaller than the room.

Vera Lynn unsticks from her glitch, and the last notes of the song drift through the apartment like smoke (some sunny d-day), and you are here. In a kitchen that was built for you by something that heard you cry through a wall. 

You lean into lips gentle against your skin and close your eyes. 

BB pauses at the threshold of the apartment.

He does this now, the pause, the backward glance, the half-second where his body is already oriented toward the corridor but his attention is still tethered to you. 

It started after the first kiss. A new subroutine in him, a step added to the departure sequence that wasn't there before, and you've watched it develop over the past few days.

“Perimeter check,” he calls out casually. The half-grin flashes. “Back soon.”

You cross the kitchen, pressing your lips to his cheek. A quick, light contact, the kind of kiss that says be safe without saying it.

BB's hand catches your chin.

His fingers close around it,, his thumb and forefinger framing your jaw the way he'd frame a shot if he were Bobby, if he had a camera, if the instinct that lives in those borrowed hands were pointed at a lens instead of at your face. He tilts your head. Tips it up. Holds you exactly where he wants you.

And he kisses you.

Full, wet, unhurried, his lips parting against yours with a confidence he didn't have two days ago in the kitchen. He's been learning, replaying, refining, the way he refines everything, and the kiss he gives you now is deeper than the first, more certain, carrying the heat that slammed through both of you the first time and has been simmering since, banked but not extinguished. His tongue brushes your lower lip. His fingers tighten on your chin. 

He makes that sound again. The low, needy one, the one that lives at the back of his throat with the purr, and he tries to swallow it, almost, but not quite.

BB pulls back. A centimetre, his mouth hovering.

“Was that okay?” he breathes out, his breath on your lips. His eyes search yours with that earnest, slightly worried focus. Still checking, treating every escalation like a threshold he needs your permission to cross.

You nod. You don't trust your voice. You stay close, your forehead almost touching his, breathing the same air, and the hum in the walls dips low and warm around you.

BB presses his lips to your forehead. Holds them there. 

"Stay," he murmurs against your skin.

Then he's gone. The hum adjusts, tightens, and you're alone in the apartment with the ghost of his mouth on your brow and the taste of him on your lips.

You decide to sort the nest to kill time.

It doesn't need sorting, really.

BB arranges it with a precision that borders on pedantic, the blankets layered in an exact order, the pillows positioned at angles he's adjusted over weeks of watching how you sleep. But your hands need occupation, and your brain needs distraction, because the kiss is still on your mouth, the taste is still there, and the wanting is a warm, heavy thing in the pit of your stomach. 

And if you don't move, don't work, don't put your hands on fabric and fold, you're going to lie down on this bed and think about his fingers on your chin and his tongue on your lip and the sound he made, and you can't afford to be that soft right now. Not while he's out there. Not while Entity X is out there.

You refold the top blanket. Smooth the creases. Adjust the pillow on the left side—your side, the one that holds the impression of your head—and reach for the second pillow, the one on BB's side that he doesn't need but uses because you told him beds have two pillows and he'd looked at you with that tilted curiosity and said why? and you'd said because that's how it works and he'd said that's not a reason and you'd said because it means someone else sleeps here too and he'd gone quiet for a long time and the next morning there were two pillows.

You're smoothing the second pillowcase when you hear it.

Your hand stills.

“—not about that, can you just—”

Your voice. Your own voice, coming from somewhere beyond the apartment walls, floating through the hum the way Vera Lynn had floated. Sourceless, directionless. Except this isn't music. This is you. A version of you from before, the you that existed on the other side of the wall, and the sound of your own voice reaching you from the yellow makes your blood slow in your veins.

“—I'm just asking if we're okay, Bobby, that's all I'm asking—”

And then his. Bobby's. The real Bobby, the original, the voice you haven't heard in— 

You don't know how long. Months. Maybe onger. And the sound of it hits you in the sternum like a fist because it's exactly the same, the same timbre and cadence, the same tired dismissive flatness that used to make the back of your throat burn.

“We're fine.”

Two words. Tossed over his shoulder. The verbal equivalent of a shrug, of a turned back, of a man already looking at the television while his girlfriend stands in the kitchen with her hands gripping the counter and her chest full of words she's running out of courage to say.

“You keep saying that, but you don't—Bobby, can you look at me? Can you just—”

“I am looking at you.”

“You're not. You're looking at the screen. I'm asking you to turn around and actually—”

“What do you want me to say?" And there it is—the edge. The blade that lives under the casual, the sharp thing that comes out when he feels cornered, when the conversation is moving toward a territory he doesn't want to enter. Not anger. Worse than anger. Impatience. A man who’s decided this conversation is unnecessary before it started. “We're fine, babe. I'm here. What else do you want?”

“I want you to talk to me—”

“I'm talking to you right now. Stop trying to turn this into a fight.”

“That's not—Bobby, that's not what I mean, and you know it.”

Silence of a man who’s already disengaged follows, who’s pulled the drawbridge up mid-conversation and is now sitting behind his own walls waiting for you to exhaust yourself against them. You know that silence. You lived inside that silence for months. You drowned in it.

You set the pillow down. Your hands are trembling.

You know you shouldn't. Your instincts are screaming loudly. The animal brain hisses warnings. The brain that’s spent months learning the rules of this place and the first rule, the foundational rule, the one BB drilled into you before he taught you anything else, is stay in the nest. Stay in the apartment. Stay inside the protection he carved for you out of Level 0's guts.

But your voice is out there. Bobby's voice is out there. And the sound of that exact conversation—that devastating, ordinary conversation, the kind you had a hundred times, the kind that ended with you staring at the ceiling at two AM—is pulling at you the way gravity pulls. 

Not curiosity. Recognition. The lure of an old wound being reopened.

You step out of the apartment.

The corridor beyond the front door is yellow. Long. The sublevel hallway that connects the apartment to the main body of Level 0, the passage BB carved like a throat between his territory and yours. 

The fluorescent lights buzz overhead in that flat shadowless drone, and the hum is steady, even, unchanged. Nothing looks wrong. Nothing feels wrong, except that your voice is coming from the far end of the corridor, from beyond the doorway where the sublevel opens into Level 0 proper, and the conversation is continuing, rolling forward, playing itself out like a recording that doesn't know it's being listened to.

“—I feel like you don't even notice if I'm here or not. Bobby, do you notice? Do you notice when I'm standing right in front of you?”

Your eyes burn. The lump in your throat is solid, immovable, sharp-edged. You walk toward the sound. One hand trails the wall, and your bare feet are silent on the carpet, and the conversation beyond pulls you forward step by step.

“You're being dramatic.”

The words hit you like a slap. Not because they're new. Because they're not. 

Bobby said that. Bobby said those exact words, in that same exact tone, with that exact tired, dismissive, I-don't-have-the-energy-for-this tone, and the accuracy of the reproduction makes your skin prickle because the Backrooms shouldn't have this. 

The Backrooms shouldn't have the argument you had on a random Tuesday in October in a kitchen in Santa Clara. The Backrooms shouldn't know what Bobby sounded like when he was making you feel invisible.

“I'm not being dramatic, I'm being honest, I'm trying to tell you that I'm hurting and you won't even—”

“Hurting from what? Babe, I don’t want to fight. Stop turning everything into an argument.” Bobby's voice, louder now. The edge hardens into a wall. “You want me to sit here and—what? Have a feelings conversation? I'm tired. I worked all day. Can we just—can we not?”

You stop at the doorway.

The sublevel opens into the corridor beyond. Level 0 proper, BB's territory, the locked-down hallways that nothing enters and nothing leaves. The lights stretch into the yellow distance. The carpet extends, flat and damp, into the dark. 

The conversation is louder here, bouncing off the walls, your voice and Bobby's voice layered on top of each other in a terrible intimacy, and your eyes are full, and the anger is back. The buried anger, the one BB identified months ago, the one you folded into self-doubt and swallowed. It's risen now, pulled to the surface by the sound of Bobby refusing, again, to try. To talk. To turn around and listen. 

To look at you, see you standing there with your heart in your hands, asking for the bare minimum, and be told you're being dramatic.

The doorway is empty.

Your voices continue, playing in the walls. But there's nothing there, just the corridor. More of the yellow, and the dark at the far end, where the lights don't reach. Where the fluorescents give way to a blackness that is too thick, too solid to be ordinary shadow.

You stare at the dark.

The dark stares back.

Your sweat goes cold. A full-body temperature drop, your skin prickling from scalp to ankles, every hair on your arms standing in unison, and the moisture on your palms turns to ice water, and your heartbeat detonates. Slams against the cage of your ribs so hard you feel it in your teeth. Once. Twice. A third time that shakes your vision.

The conversation stops.

Your voice. Bobby's voice. Gone. Cut off mid-sentence like a throat being closed, and the silence that replaces it is not Level 0's silence, not the hum-filled quiet of a place holding itself still. This is the absence of sound. The void where sound should be. A silence so complete it has its own pressure, pushing against your eardrums, filling your skull with a static that isn't static but attention. 

Vast, focused, oriented entirely on you.

The dark moves.

A motion that starts at the far end of the corridor and travels toward you with unhurried, deliberate patience, like whatever it is has all the time in the world and knows it. The fluorescent lights flicker (one, two, three in sequence), and when they reignite, they’re not yellow anymore.

They’re red.

A deep, arterial crimson that transforms the corridor into a visceral maw that looks less like a hallway and more like standing in the inside of a throat. The carpet darkens. The walls darken. Familiar geometry of Level 0 warps under the red light into a place you don't recognise, a version of BB's territory that has been flooded with something foreign, something that changes the colour of the air itself.

The lights flicker again. Red, black, red, black. A strobe, pulsing, each flash revealing the dark a little closer, a little more solid, a shape forming inside it the way a body forms inside smoke, and in the stuttering crimson you see it.

Your head tips up.

And up.

And up.

It comes into the red light the way a whale breaches water. Slowly, the sheer scale of it requiring a recalibration of your visual field that your brain refuses to perform.

Your legs won't move. Your body has locked up, every muscle seized in the ancient, primate, pre-verbal grip of a fear so total it bypasses the nervous system and goes straight to the marrow. 

This isn’t the Smiler or the Howler. This isn’t six agents with weapons and tactical vocabulary. This is the thing in the notebook. The symbol you drew on page after page, updating weekly, tracking its movements at the perimeter with clinical detachment because clinical detachment was the only way to hold it at arm's length.

It's not at the perimeter anymore.

It's tall. Obscenely, horrifically tall. Its body fills the corridor from floor to ceiling, which suddenly seems too low, its shape pressing against the walls as if the hallway were built around it, or as if it had grown to fill the hallway.

It's shaped wrong, proportioned wrong, only vaguely humanoid silhouette stretched to the breaking point and then stretched further, limbs too long, muscular, joints articulating at angles that make your eyes slide off them like water off glass.

Its skin is more like a hide. Leathery. Matte. A deep, dark red that absorbs the crimson light instead of reflecting it, like something that was red once and has since become a surface that eats light and gives nothing back. No texture. No sheen. The flat, dead finish of something organic that has forgotten how to be alive.

And it has no face.

The surface where a face should be is smooth. Featureless. A blank expanse of that matte leathery skin, curved slightly, like the inside of a mask, and the blankness is worse than any feature could be because your brain keeps trying to find the face, keeps scanning the surface for eyes, mouth, nose, any anchor of recognition, any sign that what you're looking at is a being and not a wall of skin that has learned to walk.

Then the eyes appear.

They don't open, they emerge. 

Bulging outward from the surface of the face, pressing through the skin like something hatching, the leathery hide stretching and thinning and splitting apart in wet, peeling seams, and what emerges is yellow. Burning, furnace-bright yellow, the colour of the fluorescent lights distilled and concentrated and superheated until it became something that hurts to look at. Two points of searing amber in the featureless red, and they fix on you.

They fix on you, and they don't move.

Tears spill down your cheeks. 

The animal body's response to being seen by something that should not be able to see. A reflex, a pressure release, your system venting whatever it can in a desperate attempt to process the input flooding through it. 

Your heart hammers inside your chest, your mouth bone dry. Your hands are numb at your sides, the fingers bloodless and tingling, and you can feel your pulse in your throat and your temples.

Entity X.

It's bigger than you thought. Bigger than BB's clipped descriptions and careful evasions. 

It fills the corridor the way a flood would. Totally, leaving no space unoccupied. And those eyes, those burning yellow eyes, are locked on you with a focus that’s not predatory. Not hungry. Patient. 

It’s been waiting for this, you realise with a lurch. To lure you out with the sound of your own voice and Bobby's voice and the argument calibrated to the exact frequency of your buried fury, and now that you're here, now that you're standing in the doorway with your tears on your face and your anger in your throat, it’s in no rush. 

It has what it wanted. Your attention. Your recognition. 

It reaches for you.

The arm extends. Long, impossibly long, the limb unfolding like a telescope, the joints articulating in that wrong way, and the hand comes through the doorway. Into the sublevel. Into BB's territory, into the space he carved and sealed and locked down, the space where nothing enters—

The hand comes apart.

Ribbons. The skin peels away from the fingers in long, wet strips, the flesh beneath splitting and curling back, and the arm disintegrates from fingertip to wrist to forearm in a cascade of shredding tissue that falls to the carpet in dark. Heavy coils dissolve on contact, eaten by the floor, absorbed into BB's territory like an immune response rejecting foreign matter. 

The barrier—invisible, structural, woven into the very air at a level you can't perceive—is doing what BB built it to do. Unmaking anything that tries to cross inside and harm you.

You scramble backwards.

Your heel catches the carpet. You stumble, catch yourself on the wall, push off, and your body is finally moving, finally responding. The paralysis encasing you cracks, and the survival brain kicks online with a screaming urgency.

You back away from the doorway, and Entity X is standing in the corridor beyond it, and you watch in mute terror as its arm begins to regrow. The ribbons reverse, the skin re-knitting, the flesh sealing back over the bones with a wet, thick sound like clay being pressed into shape.

It tracks your retreat with those yellow eyes, and it’s not even slightly bothered.

It’s not bothered at all.

It reaches again. The same arm, healed, whole, the matte red skin glistening faintly with the residue of its own reconstruction. It pushes through the barrier, and the skin starts to peel again. It pushes harder, the arm advancing centimetre by centimetre through the invisible wall, and the peeling is slower this time. 

The barrier is straining. You can feel it in the hum. A high, tight frequency that sounds like metal under stress, and Entity X is shredding its own flesh to reach you, and it doesn't flinch. Doesn't falter, those burning eyes fixed on you with an intensity that is not rage, not hunger, is something far worse than either.

It's insistence.

You turn and run.

The corridor stretches. Or you're running slower than you think, or the sublevel is responding to the breach by elongating, by putting distance between you and the doorway, and you sprint for the apartment at full speed. Your bare feet slap against the carpet, your breath coming in ragged, tearing gasps, and behind you, you can hear it. 

Not footsteps. A sound like tearing fabric, like the barrier giving way fibre by fibre, like something enormous and patient methodically peeling through a protection that was supposed to be absolute.

You slam through the apartment doors, gasping for breath. 

You scramble for the lock. It’s decorative, you know that, it's a human gesture in a human-shaped apartment, and it will stop nothing that just shredded itself through BB's barrier, but you still try, grabbing the bookshelf next. The one BB just arranged. Your notebooks cascade to the floor as you drag it across the carpet and shove it against the door. The wood scrapes, the weight of it pathetic against what's coming. 

You grab the kitchen table. A chair. The standing lamp from the corner. Anything. Everything. Piling it against the door in a barricade of furniture that looks exactly like what it is: a pathetic attempt to buy time.

“BB!”

Your voice breaks on his name. Cracks open, raw, a scream that comes from the bottom of your lungs and fills the apartment and bounces off the walls he built for you.

“BB, COME BACK! BB!”

The door splinters.

Not from the hinges. From the surface. The wood bulges inward, warping, then splits along a line running from top to bottom, and through the crack, you see it. The red. The matte, light-eating red. And then an arm. 

It comes through the gap the way the first one came through the barrier, fingers curling around the edge of the broken door, and the wood peels away from the frame in long strips. The apartment dismantles itself around the intrusion, BB's careful construction coming apart under the weight of something that will not stop.

The clawed hand reaches into the room.

You grab the lamp. The standing lamp, with a heavy brass base, the most solid thing within reach, and you swing it. It connects with the arm, bounces off the matte skin, and the impact travels up your wrists and into your shoulders, but the thing doesn't react. The arm keeps coming. You throw the lamp. Throw books. Throw a kitchen chair that shatters against the forearm and falls into pieces.

“Stay away from me!" You're screaming, your voice stripped raw, your body backing toward the far wall with nothing left to throw. “Get away—”

Entity X's eyes find you through the wreckage of the door.

Yellow. Burning. Fixed. It hasn't blinked. Through the barrier, through the peeling, the furniture and the lamp and the screaming. Those eyes locked onto you in the corridor, and they have not left you. 

They’ll not leave you, and the constancy of the gaze is the most terrifying thing you've ever experienced because it means you. You’re the target. You’ve always been the target. Whatever this thing is, whatever it wants, whatever fuel it runs on—it wants you, specifically, personally, with a focus that transcends predation and enters the territory of purpose.

The arm reaches for you. Healed. Whole. The stripped flesh re-formed, the fingers extended, and it's close enough now that you can see the texture of the skin. Up close, it's not smooth; it's covered in fine, hairline fractures. Like dried earth, something that cracked and sealed and cracked again, a surface that has been broken and rebuilt so many times, the damage has become a pattern.

The arm detaches.

Ripped, torn from the shoulder socket with a violence so total the sound it makes isn't a tear but a detonation. A concussive, wet blast that shakes the walls and sends a spray of dark viscera across the ceiling and the wrecked furniture and your face, warm and thick, smelling of copper and something older, something mineral.

Entity X's arm hits the floor. The fingers are still curling. Still reaching. Oriented toward you, even severed from the body.

The thing that threw it is standing in the doorway.

It’s not BB and not Bobby.

Not anything that has ever worn a human face, and you understand this immediately, viscerally, in the part of your brain that predates language and operates on pure animal recognition: the shape in the doorway is wrong. 

It's Bobby's height, but the proportions have shifted. The shoulders sit too wide, the stance too low, the geometry of the body rearranged into something optimised for destruction rather than disguise. The face is Bobby's face, but it's barely holding, the features sliding, the jaw too sharp, the eyes fully black. Two pits of absolute dark in a face that is coming apart at the seams. 

The skin is cracking. Not like Entity X's fractures—like porcelain, like a mask that's been struck, fissures radiating from the jaw and the cheekbones, and through the cracks you can see—not flesh, not bone, but nothing. An absence. A dark so total it makes Entity X's darkness look like shadow.

He's covered in black. Head to chest, arms to elbows, the viscous substance coating his skin and matting his hair to his forehead, dripping from his hands in long, slow ropes. Whatever distraction Entity X deployed to pull him from the perimeter, BB didn't just fight through it. 

He annihilated it. And he didn't stop to put the face back on before he came for you.

The hum collapses. 

The ambient frequency of Level 0—the constant, ever-present vibration that’s been the background radiation of your existence since you fell through the wall—drops to a subsonic register that you don't hear so much as feel. 

A pressure wave that presses against your eardrums, your chest, and settles at the backs of your eyes. The red lights in the corridor blow out. Every single one. The apartment goes dark except for Entity X's burning yellow eyes and the fissures in BB's cracking face, which glow. Faintly, coldly, with a light that has no colour name.

BB opens his mouth, and the sound that comes out is not a voice.

It’s the hum.

The hum itself, weaponised, concentrated, forced through a throat that has stopped pretending to be human. The sound fills the apartment, the corridor, the sublevel, more vibration than language, dragged through the collapsing shape of Bobby's vocal cords with a fury so enormous it makes the floor ripple:

“Clever distraction.”

Entity X turns.

The motion is glacial. Unhurried. The massive red body rotating in the wrecked doorway of the apartment to face the thing that just removed its arm, and even now—even turning to face BB, even orienting its body toward the threat—its eyes stay on you.

Its eyes stay on you.

The head doesn't move with the body. The neck articulates. Wrong, all wrong. Rotating independently of the torso at a degree that no anatomy should permit. The burning yellow gaze remains fixed on your position against the far wall while the body faces BB, the removed arm regrowing in wet, rapid pulses at the severed shoulder, rising to meet what's coming.

The fight starts.

You can't follow it. Not really. Not the way you'd follow a human fight, with fists and momentum and the readable physics of two bodies colliding. 

This is different. These are two beings that don't obey the laws of physics, tearing at each other in a space that's coming apart around them. 

BB moves the way he moved against the agents. Too fast, fluid, the human shape abandoned for something more efficient, more angular, more suited to what he actually is, and Entity X absorbs. Takes. Endures. 

BB tears through its torso, and the flesh re-knits immediately. BB shatters its jaw with a crack, the featureless face splintering like ceramic, the yellow eyes bulging through the fissures, and the jaw reforms. BB puts his fist through its chest, and the chest closes around his arm, and for a terrible second, they're locked, joined. BB rips free with a sound like tearing metal, and Entity X is already whole again, already standing, already watching you through the chaos with those eyes that have never left, never wavered, never once looked at anything else.

You're behind BB. Pressed against the wall, moving when he moves, keeping his body between you and the thing, and you're trying to be small, trying to be invisible, but Entity X doesn't need to see you to know where you are. It knows. The way it knew your voice. The way it knew Bobby's voice. The way it knew the exact argument to play through the walls to bring you to the threshold.

BB is winning. At first. His speed is devastating, his fury enormous, and Entity X staggers under the assault, the massive body driven backwards through the wrecked apartment and into the corridor, and for a few brutal seconds you think he's got this, he's got it, he's going to unmake it the way he unmade the Smiler—

Entity X catches his arm.

The movement is casual. Almost lazy. One massive red hand closing around BB's forearm mid-strike, and the force of the stop shudders through the corridor, through the floor under your feet. BB wrenches. Twists. The hand doesn't open. Entity X holds him there—one-armed, the other still regrowing—and for the first time in the fight, it isn't retreating.

It's pushing forward.

The shift is tectonic. 

Entity X drives BB backwards, and the corridor shakes around you. BB's feet leave the ground for a fraction of a second, and when he lands, his posture has changed. Less offensive, more braced, the shape of someone absorbing impact instead of delivering it. Entity X hits him. Open-handed, a strike that catches BB across the chest and sends him into the wall hard enough to crater the surface, and the sound BB makes is not a snarl. It's a gasp. A short, involuntary, winded exhalation, the noise of a body—even a body that isn't a body—taking damage it didn't expect.

And through it all. Through the fighting and the shattering and the black blood and the reknitting flesh.

Entity X's eyes never leave you.

The gaze stays locked on you with the serene, unwavering patience that knows this fight is temporary. That knows BB is between it and you, and that BB is the obstacle, but you’re the objective and obstacles, eventually, move.

BB goes down.

A blow you don't see—too fast, too angled, connecting with something vital in BB's body—and he hits the floor and doesn't get up immediately. 

He gets to his hands and knees. The black blood drips from his mouth now, from his nose, from a gash across his chest that isn't closing the way Entity X's wounds close. His arms are shaking. The human face is flickering. BB, then the thing beneath, then BB again, the mask destabilising under the damage, slipping.

“BB!”

You're moving before you think. Scrambling across the wreckage, over the broken furniture and the shattered doorframe, toward him, toward the crumpled shape of him on the floor, and your hands reach for his shoulders—

“Stop.”

His voice. A snarled command, delivered with every frequency he has. Human, inhuman, the hum itself weaponised into a single syllable that hits you in the chest like a physical force and roots your feet to the floor. 

He lifts his head. His eyes are black, and his mouth is black with blood. The expression on his face is wild, furious, terrified. An emotion he’s never shown you before, an emotion you didn't know he was capable of, and the terror is not for himself.

“Level 974.” He spits blood. Black. Thick. “Mr Kitty. You know the route. Go, now.”

“I'm not leaving you—”

“You’re a target.” Each word costs him. You can see it. The effort of speech, of maintaining the face, of holding the human shape together while the damage tries to unmake it. “As long as you’re here, it will not stop. It doesn't want me. It wants you. And I can't—” His jaw clenches, a tremor running through his arms. “I can't fight it and protect you. I need you gone. I need you out of range.”

Entity X rises behind him. The massive body straightening. The burning eyes on you. Always on you.

“BB—”

“I am older than this place.” Low. Fierce. Black blood on his teeth, and his eyes fully dark, the ancient thing speaking through the ruined face with a conviction that shakes the walls. “I’m older than the walls and the hum and the doors and it. I have survived every horror this place has made. But I cannot do it while I'm holding back.”

Holding back.

You understand, then. Instantly and fully. 

He's been fighting at half capacity. Less. Fighting with one hand while the other shields you, positioning his body between you and the thing, dividing his attention between destruction and protection and losing ground on both. But it's more than that. 

You look at his face—the cracking face, the flickering face, Bobby's features sliding and reforming and sliding again—and you understand the other constraint. 

The one he'd never say. The Bobby suit. The face, the body, the human shape he's maintained for you since the day you came through the wall. It takes power to hold it. Focus. Resources currently being spent on keeping twenty-two-year-old Bobby Franklin's jaw attached to his skull, instead of being channelled into whatever he actually is underneath. 

He's not just protecting you with his body. He's protecting you with his form. Keeping the familiar shape, the face you trust, the lips you kissed, but keeping all of it intact costs him, bleeds him, divides the vast and ancient thing into a fraction of its true capacity. 

As long as you're here, he will keep wearing Bobby. As long as he's wearing Bobby, Entity X will keep gaining ground.

You’re not his weakness. You’re his ceiling. And as long as you're in this corridor, he will keep hitting that ceiling, and Entity X will keep pushing through it, and the math only ends one way.

“Trust me,” BB says, blood in his mouth, the face slipping. The thing underneath looks at you with an intensity that has nothing to do with age or power but with promise he made you, his hand on your cheek. “Run.”

You grab the notebook.

It's on the floor, knocked from the shelf in the barricade, pages bent, the cover dented. 

You snatch it up. Press it to your chest. The routes are in there. Level 0 to Level 1, Level 1 to the stairwell threshold, the stairwell to the passage threading through Level 2 and opening into the long, dark corridor descending to Level 974. You mapped it. You walked it with BB at your side and his hand at your back, and you marked every turn, every landmark, every shift in the hum that signals a boundary.

You look at BB one more time. On the floor. Bleeding black. The face barely holding. Entity X rising behind him, vast and red and patient, those yellow eyes burning through the dark as it turns to follow you. 

BB snarls, and Entity X’s legs crack beneath it. 

You run.

Through the wrecked sublevel. Into the corridor, into Level 0, your notebook against your chest and your bare feet on the carpet and the sound of the fight erupting behind you. Massive, structural, the sound of two ancient things finally meeting without a ceiling, and you run toward the route you mapped, the path you memorised, and you don't look back.

You run until you can't hear it anymore.

The fight stopped being audible three corridors back; the sounds of two entities tearing each other apart swallowed by the hum. 

What you're running from now is the silence. Weighted silence of a level that’s been breached, holding itself still the way an animal holds still when the predator is too close to outrun. The red light hasn't faded. It pulses occasionally, as if Level 0 itself is wounded and you're running through it.

Your bare feet slap on the carpet, the notebook clutched to your chest. The cover bent, the pages pressed against your sternum. 

You're navigating from memory now, the left fork at the junction where the carpet gets warmer, the right turn at the corridor where the hum drops a semitone, the long stretch past the section with the water-stained ceiling tiles that marks the boundary of BB's inner territory. 

You know this route, walked it with BB multiple times. Traced it in the notebook with blue ink and annotated the landmarks and tested yourself on it in the nest while BB watched with that quiet pride, and the memory of his face—the last time you saw it, cracking, bleeding black, the ancient thing surfacing through the fissures—makes your vision blur and you blink hard and keep running.

The corridor opens up.

You skid to a stop. The junction ahead is the one that leads to the stairwell threshold, the one that drops you into the transitional space between Level 0 and Level 1. 

But that’s not why you stop. You stop because the corridor is full of furniture.

And you know this furniture. The recognition is immediate, physical. The flat-packed shelving units with the Scandinavian labels. The plastic-wrapped headboards stacked against the wall. A dining table, oak veneer, the floor model with the scratch on the left leg where Bobby kicked it once, carrying inventory, and the scratch is there, exactly where it should be. The recognition hits you like a blow because this is Clark's. 

Clark's inventory: the same flatpacks and display pieces you organised on night shifts, labelled in your handwriting, and sorted by vendor into bins.

The Backrooms do this. You know they do. They absorb, they replicate, they pull pieces of the real world through the membrane and deposit them in corridors like driftwood. BB explained it once: the levels aren't separate from reality, they're underneath it, and sometimes the underneath leaks up and the above leaks down and things end up where they don't belong. 

But knowing the mechanics doesn't prepare you for the lurch of seeing Clark's dining table in a yellow corridor, and you press your hand to the wall and breathe. The wall is warm under your palm, and you think of BB, and the thought is a blade, so you keep moving—

Voices.

Entity X's lure would be sourceless, directionless. These voices have a direction. They're coming from ahead and to the left, from the section of the corridor that bends around the stacked flatpacks, and they're real. Human. Layered on top of each other with the particular rhythm of people talking in a confined space, voices bouncing off hard surfaces, and you can hear—

“—I don't care, I'm going down there, let go of—”

“Bobby, stop, you can't just—we don't know what's down there, we don't know if—”

“—came through here, right? Through this wall, through this—whatever the hell this is. If she came through here, maybe she's lost, maybe she's—”

“Bobby. Baby. Listen to me—”

Your feet stop. Your lungs cease functioning. 

Bobby.

Bobby's voice. Real, live, present. Happening right now on the other side of a bend in a corridor that shouldn't exist. 

You'd know Entity X's trick by now, the sourceless quality, the way it comes from everywhere and nowhere. This has a direction. This has Bobby's actual vocal cords behind it. And it sounds different. The tired, dismissive Bobby who said you're being dramatic is gone. This voice is raw. Stripped. A man speaking through gravel, through grief so thorough it's changed the texture of his vocal cords. Desperate in a way Bobby never used to sound because Bobby never used to let himself sound like anything except perfectly at ease.

And the other voice. The woman. Calling him baby.

You step past the wall.

The corridor opens into a wider space. One of the junction rooms, the kind where several hallways converge, and the ceiling is higher, the fluorescents brighter, and the hum is louder because more of Level 0 is accessible from a single point. The flatpack furniture from Clark's store is stacked along the walls. A rope trails across the carpet from the far wall, where the concrete appears to dip into a dark space below.

Clark stands near the rope. Older than you remember. Heavier in the face, the circles under his eyes darker, his work shirt untucked and stained, his hands clenched. He looks terrified and dazed in equal measure. 

And a woman. Young. Dark hair, cut short, slip flops. She's got one hand on Bobby's arm and the other pressed to her own chest, and her face is tight with a fear that hasn't fully landed yet, still hovering in the space between this can't be real and this is real, and I might die.

And Bobby.

Your Bobby.

He's standing in the middle of the junction room with the rope half-tied from his belt and a camera in his hand—of course, even here, even in the impossible, Bobby brought the camera—and he's thinner. 

The crop top hangs differently on him now, looser, the chain at his throat sitting lower against collarbones that are more prominent than they used to be. His face is harder. The softness that used to live at the edges, the boyish quality, the roundness that you used to trace with your fingers in the morning light, is gone. Carved away. What's left is angular, drawn, the face of a man who hasn't been sleeping right for a long time. Who hasn't been eating right, either. 

He’s been doing something to himself, or having something done to him, that has stripped the youth from his bones and left behind this sharpened, hollowed version of the person you loved.

You don't know how long it's been. You don't know what happened to him after you fell through the wall. You just know that the Bobby standing in front of you is not the Bobby you left, and the distance between those two versions is written in the new, foreign angles of his still handsome face.

The woman spots you first.

Her gasp is sharp, bitten off, the sound of a person encountering something that doesn't fit the parameters of what she was prepared for. Her hand tightens on Bobby's arm. Her eyes go wide, and her body shifts. Backwards, behind him, an instinct that tells you everything about their dynamic in a single gesture.

Bobby turns.

For a moment, there's only shocked silence. Bobby stares at you. You stare at Bobby. 

The light buzzes, and the rope trails across the carpet. The woman's hand is on his arm, and Clark's flashlight beam trembles on the floor, and you’re standing ten feet apart in an impossible place, looking at each other for the first time since the doorway, the grunt, and the don't wait up and neither of you breathes.

Bobby's mouth moves. No sound, a rasp of breath. Then, cracking at the edges:

"Baby?"

His voice splinters on the second syllable. Splits open. The word comes out ragged, disbelieving, torn from somewhere deep, and the information—you, standing in a yellow corridor, alive, alive—is too big for his face, and the room.

You don't respond. You can't. Your throat has closed around a sound that won't form. 

You're looking at him. Bobby. Real Bobby. The original. The man whose face you've been kissing on another body for who knows how long, whose voice you've been hearing through borrowed vocal cords, whose edges and angles and scars you've memorised on a copy so perfect you'd almost forgotten there was an original. 

And here he is. Diminished and sharpened, desperate and real, standing in front of you in a crop top and a chain with a camera in his shaking hand, and the distance between you is ten feet, and however long it's been and all the things neither of you said.

Bobby drops the camera.

It hits the carpet with a muted thud. 

Bobby, who’s never let go of a camera voluntarily in his life, who held onto the viewfinder the way other men hold onto control, lets it fall from his fingers like it weighs nothing. Like it was never important, like every hour of footage he ever shot was just a rehearsal for the moment he'd need his hands free to reach for you.

He yanks at the rope around his waist. His fingers are clumsy, frantic, tearing at the knot rather than untying it, his jaw clenched and his breathing coming in short, hard bursts through his nose. The woman takes a step toward him.

“Bobby, wait, you don't know if—”

He doesn't hear her. The rope falls. He steps out of it like stepping out of a skin he doesn't need anymore, and he starts walking toward you. Fast, accelerating, his stride lengthening with each step, his breathing growing more laboured, and the expression on his face is furious. 

At the ten feet of carpet between his body and yours, at whatever he's been through since you vanished, at whatever it cost him, and he’s crossing it with the barely-contained ferocity.

He stops. Three feet from you. Two.

“Fuck,” he whispers, his eyes glassy, red-rimmed. His lashes are wet. Bobby, who doesn't cry in front of people, who presses the heels of his hands into his eyes and grinds the tears back, who’s never once let you see him break, is standing in front of you with tears in his eyes and making no effort to hide them. 

“Fuck,” he says again, softer, cracking, his whole face contorting around the word like it's the only syllable left in his vocabulary. 

He's looking at your face. Scanning every feature the way he used to scan you through the viewfinder, except there's no viewfinder now, no glass, nothing between his eyes and your face, and you can see the exact moment his brain confirms what his body already knows.

It's you. It's really you.

His hand lifts. Shaking. Visibly, violently shaking, the tremor running from his shoulder through his elbow through his wrist through his fingers, and his hand reaches across the two feet of air between you and lands on your shoulder.

You flinch.

Bobby makes a sound. A wrecked, gutted thing. Less than a gasp, more than a breath. His fingers tighten on your shoulder, involuntary, desperate, like he's afraid you'll dissolve if he loosens his grip. His other hand comes up and grabs your other shoulder, and he's holding you at arm's length with both hands, his face falling apart, the composure crumbling, and his voice when it comes out is barely there:

“You're real. God, please, tell me you're real, baby. Tell me this isn't—tell me I'm not—”

You're both breathing hard. Standing in a yellow corridor, his hand on your shoulder. Your body is rigid, his eyes wet as they drink you in, and the woman behind him is watching you both. Clark mumbles his disbelief faintly, and the world reduces to the two feet of air between your body and Bobby’s and all the wreckage on either side.

Bobby whispers your name.

Not baby. Your name. The real one, the full one, spoken so quietly you almost don't hear it, spoken the way you'd speak a word you're afraid will break if you say it too loud. Your name in Bobby's real mouth, the one that kissed you on a Thursday morning and said stay and meant it, and the sound of it cracks you open. 

He throws his arms around you.

Without gentleness, without hesitation. Bobby grabs you with both arms and pulls you into his chest so hard you stumble, your bare feet sliding on the carpet. His arms lock around your back, and his face buries in your neck. He's holding you desperately, with the full-body grip, a man who’s just recovered the thing he was drowning without.

He's warm.

The realisation hits you with a horrible, dizzying vertigo. He's warm. His hands on your shoulders were hot. Searingly, really, shockingly hot after months of BB's cool skin, BB's below-human temperature, the constant slight chill of a body that generates heat only when kissed into producing it. 

Now his whole body is pressed against yours, and he’s a furnace. Metabolic, organic, almost unbearable. The heat of blood moving through capillaries, of a heart pumping in a chest that rises and falls because it has to, because it will stop if it doesn't. He smells like soap. Faintly. Under that, sweat. Actual sweat, the salt-and-skin smell of a human body under stress. 

And underneath that, barely there, weed. Like he smoked before coming down here. Like Bobby needed his hands to stop shaking long enough to hold the camera, and the specificity of it, the humanness of it, the biochemical reality of a man who self-medicates his anxiety with marijuana and has done it since he was nineteen, is so overwhelmingly, violently real that your knees buckle.

You cling to him. 

Your arms come up—late, delayed, your body catching up to the fact that this is happening—and your fingers grab fistfuls of his shirt, and you hold on. He holds on too, and you're both shaking. Both gasping, making sounds that aren't words at the sheer impossibility of it all. 

Just grief and relief and terror and love, suddenly all the same thing. 

Bobby's hand is on the back of your head, pressing your face into his neck, and his chest is heaving, his pulse hammering against your cheek, and he's alive, he's alive, he came for you, he found the wall, and he came through, and he's here and—

“Bobby?”

The woman's voice. Small. Wary. She's standing behind Bobby with her arms wrapped around herself and her face pinched with confusion, frightened, and underneath both of those, a hurt she's trying very hard not to let surface. She's staring at you. At your head, pressed into Bobby's neck. At Bobby's arms around you, locked, total. 

The way he's holding you like the building could come down, and he wouldn't let go.

Bobby pulls back. Only his head, only enough to see your face. His hands come up and cup your jaw, framing your face the way he used to frame shots, and his thumbs trace your cheekbones and his eyes drag over your features with the starving hunger.

“You're alive,” Bobby says hoarsely, his thumbs on your cheekbones and his eyes bright. “You're alive. I thought—the tapes, they went blank, they all went—I thought you were—fuck, you're alive. I missed so fucking much—"

The lights go red.

A sudden, total shift. Every fluorescent in the junction room snaps from yellow to deep crimson in the space of a single heartbeat, and the hum screams. A high, keening frequency that's less sound and more pressure, a vibration that pushes against your eardrums again and fills your skull. An alarm. Organic, not mechanical. 

The level itself shrieks, Level 0 responding to a breach so severe that its entire frequency is destabilising.

You know this sound, know what it means. Your body knows before your brain catches up. The red means Entity X. The alarm means the fight has moved, or ended, or escalated beyond what the level can contain. The walls are wrong, and the carpet under your feet is vibrating with a frequency you've never felt before, and every nerve in your body is firing the same message: move.

You grab Bobby's hand. Hard. Your fingers lacing through his.

“Come with me. Right now.”

“What—what is that, what's happen—”

“Right now, Bobby.”

The woman closes the distance. She's been standing behind him, arms wrapped around herself, but the alarm has shaken her forward, adrenaline overriding the hurt on her face, and she grabs Bobby's other arm with both hands.

“Bobby is not going anywhere," she insists, her voice steady. Tighter than her face. “We came here together, and we're leaving together—back through the wall, not deeper into—”

You look at her. Really look at her for the first time. Dark hair. Round jaw. Pretty in a girl-next-door way. You focus on the way she holds Bobby’s arm, the way she positions herself behind him, and remember the baby she called earlier. You see it, and something cold slides between your ribs and sits there.

“Who are you?” you ask flatly.

Bobby's hand tightens in yours. “She's—this is Kat, she works at—”

A scream splits the corridor.

Not human. Long, oscillating, rising in pitch until it hits a frequency that makes the flatpack shelving units rattle against the walls. Howler. Close. Moving fast, drawn by the alarm the way predators are drawn by distress signals, and the sound of it snaps through the junction room like a whip.

“If you want to live,” you begin, your voice dropping into a register you didn't know you owned, calm, flat, cold, the voice of a woman who’s mapped multiple levels and catalogued fifty-three entity types and survived— “you'll follow me. Now.”

You pull Bobby. Bobby grabs Kat, and you move.

You lead them the only way you know how. By the notebook, by the months of repetition and documentation. 

You check each junction against the layout in your head, cross-referencing the hum's pitch and the angle of the corridor walls. Left at the warm patch. Right at the stain. Down the corridor, where the ceiling drops by three inches and the air smells damp. Through the threshold that shifts from carpet to tile and tile to the stairwell that descends between levels.

Bobby is behind you. His hand in yours. He won't let go. His grip is crushing, his callused fingers locked around your palm with a force that will leave bruises, and every few steps, his thumb moves against your wrist. Some involuntary check, a pulse-read, confirming you're still there, still solid, still real.

“How long have you been here?” he asks. Moving fast, breathing hard, his voice pitched low. The camera is gone. Left on the carpet in the junction room, the first time Bobby has abandoned a camera since he was a boy. “How did you—are you hurt? Are you okay?”

“I'm fine.”

“You're not fine, you're barefoot in a—what is this place? Where are we?”

You work your jaw, scanning ahead to escape the storm of warring emotions in your chest. “Keep moving.”

“Baby—”

“Don't call me that.”

The words leave your mouth before you can catch them. Sharp. Reflexive. A flinch turned verbal. 

Bobby's hand tightens on yours, and you feel the impact of the words travel through his grip like a current. A brief, rigid shock, a stiffening of the fingers.

You keep walking. The stairwell descends. Kat is behind Bobby, her hand on the back of his shirt, her breathing ragged, her head on a swivel. She's terrified. You can hear it in the quality of her breath. Short, high, the particular arrhythmia of a nervous system running on pure cortisol. But she's moving. She's keeping up. She hasn't frozen up. 

Some distant, clinical part of you notes this with grudging respect.

Through Level 2. The dripping pipes and the dark. Bobby pulls Kat closer as the dripping grows louder and the shadows lengthen. Something in the walls makes a sound like breathing, and you watch him do it from the corner of your eye—watch his hand find her shoulder, watch his body angle between her and the dark—and the cold thing between your ribs turns over.

Through the transitional corridor. Down. The air changes again. Warmer, sweeter, carrying the faint smell of grass and dust, the signature of the levels that sit closer to the organic stratum. You check the notebook. Page thirty-seven. The route to 974.

Bobby is watching you. You can feel his eyes on the back of your head, on your bare feet, on the notebook clutched in your hand. On the way you navigate this impossible place with confidence. You feel him putting pieces together. That you’ve been here long enough to stop being lost. Long enough to have a system. To have bare feet, which means long enough to have stopped expecting to leave.

“You know this place,” he says. Not a question. His voice is careful, testing, wariness of someone who’s assembling a picture he doesn't want to see. “You've been—you've been here this whole time?”

“Yes.”

“Eighteen months?”

You pause. “Is that how long it's been?”

The silence behind you is devastating. Bobby's thumb stops its circuit on your wrist. Kat makes a small, wounded sound of realisation. If she wasn’t sure who you were before, she is now. 

“You didn't know,” Bobby says quietly. “You didn't know how long.”

You keep walking. The corridor opens up, the air changing again. A final threshold, a shift in the hum, and the space ahead brightens. Not with fluorescent light but something softer, golden. 

Scent of freshly cut grass, old wood and sugar fills your nose, followed by the particular mustiness of a house that’s been lived in by a being both patient and old for a very long time.

Level 974.

Mr Kitty appears at once.

One moment, the entrance to 974 is empty. The amber light, the corridor opening onto a landscape of gently rolling hills and scattered structures, some of them painted in colours too cheerful for the Backrooms, pinks and pastels that shouldn't survive down here. 

The next moment, he's there. Tall. Black. A humanoid shape standing in the centre of the path, its skin the deep, light-absorbing matte of a body that exists as a silhouette even in full illumination. It has no face. The surface where features should be is smooth, blank, and featureless, but the blankness differs from that of Entity X. 

Where Entity X's facelessness was a threat, a void, a surface that peeled open to reveal burning eyes, Mr Kitty's is gentle. Calm. The blankness of a thing that doesn't need a face because its presence communicates everything a face would. It stands with its long arms at its sides, and its smooth head tilted toward your group, its posture radiating patience the way the hum radiates sound.

Kat screams.

A sharp, bitten-off shriek at the wrongness of it, the too-tall body, the faceless head, the quality of ancient, unhurried presence that radiates from it. The scream bounces off the corridor behind you and fades into the amber light.

Bobby jerks to action. Reflex, instinct, the hardwired response to protect the person behind him. He steps in front of Kat, his arm sweeping back to push her behind his body, his jaw set and his eyes wide. His other hand still grips yours so tightly the bones grind together. 

His body is a wall between her and the threat, and the positioning is automatic, total, the posture of a man who does this without thinking.

Your stomach hollows out.

A different emptiness than fear. A cavity that opens beneath your ribs and fills with something cold and acidic. You watch Bobby shield Kat with his body the way he should have shielded you, the way you wished he would have shielded you, the way you spent months standing in doorways wishing he'd turn around and step toward you and put himself between you and anything at all. 

And he's doing it now. For her. The reflexive, unthinking protectiveness he could never perform for you when it was you who needed it. The muscle he let atrophy while you were his has somehow been rebuilt for someone else.

“It's okay,” you say, and your voice comes out even. Controlled. The cold thing behind your ribs makes your words clear. “He won't hurt you. He's safe.”

“He?” Bobby stares at the figure. The figure's blank face turns toward him. Bobby's hand tightens on yours.

“Mr Kitty.” You step forward. The tall, dark shape inclines its head toward you. A brief, acknowledging tilt, the gesture of a being that knows you and has been expecting you. “I need your help. Entity X breached the sublevel. BB is fighting it. I need—”

I'm aware.

The voice arrives inside your skull. A warm, dense pressure that fills the space behind your eyes and settles into your thoughts like sediment into still water. Mr Kitty's blank face is angled toward yours. The stillness radiating from him is calm. Steady. 

The disturbance registered across many levels. The barrier on Level 0 has been partially compromised. Your boy is still engaged.

Your stomach knots. “Is he winning?”

That depends on your definition.

“Is he alive?”

A pause. Mr Kitty's blank head inclines slightly, a gesture you've come to read as contemplation. He does not die the way you understand dying. But he is diminished. The sustained engagement is costly. The red one first used other entities to weaken him.

“Can we use your house? I need to get them somewhere safe.” Your voice catches. “Please. Just…”

Follow the path, little one. You’ll see it in the distance. I need to check the perimeter first. It’s chaos out there. Something else might slip through. 

You nod, gratitude plain on your face. Bobby and Kat are staring at you with matching expressions of blank, dissociated horror when you turn to them. 

“You were talking to it,” Bobby blurts out, flat with disbelief when Mr Kitty flickers out of sight. "You were having a conversation with a faceless thing. What the fuck.”

“It's complicated,” you mutter. “Follow me. Quickly.”

You lead them up the path. The amber light is steady here, warm and sourceless, and the hills roll gently toward a cluster of structures. 

Houses, loosely, buildings with doors and windows and roofs that approximate the concept of dwelling in the way the Backrooms approximate everything. Close enough to function but underlaid with a wrongness that only registers if you look too long. The second structure on the right is small. Wooden. A porch with a rocking chair. 

The door opens when you touch it, and the inside smells like dust and old paper and tea and the particular warmth of a house that is, impossibly, safe.

Mr Kitty is already inside. Standing in the corner of the kitchen, his dark shape nearly touching the ceiling, his long arms folded in front of him with a stillness that radiates patience. The plate of scones sits on the counter beside him.

You usher Bobby and Kat inside. Kat's hands are shaking. Bobby's jaw is tight, and his eyes are moving—scanning the room, the windows, Mr Kitty's dark shape in the corner, you—with the frantic, comprehensive attention of a man who is trying very hard to apply logic to a situation that has left logic behind long ago.

“Sit,” you say. “Eat. Don't touch anything you don't recognise, especially the toys.”

You look behind them. The doorway is empty. The amber path stretches back toward the corridor, quiet.

“Where's Clark?”

Bobby's jaw tightens. He doesn't look at the door. “We got separated. The dark section, with the pipes. Something moved in the walls, and he panicked and ran the wrong direction and I—” He stops. Swallows. The guilt on his face is immediate, reflexive. “I couldn't go after him. I had to keep—I had to keep moving forward."

Kat puts her hand on his arm. “He had the rope. He can follow it back.”

“The rope was tied to me.”

The silence fills the room. You look at the door. Clark is somewhere in the Backrooms, alone, without a map, without a guide, without the months of hard-won knowledge sitting in the notebook pressed to your chest. Clark is somewhere in the dark, and he’s still a man who hired you, who complimented your attention to detail, told you once in an offhand way that seemed to surprise even him that you would’ve made a fine architect, like him. 

“Mr Kitty,” you say, turning toward the entity. “Clark. He's on Level 2. Can you—”

I'm aware. I'll send guidance. The older male is frightened but unharmed. For now.

You cross to the window. The amber light outside is steady. The green hills are quiet. No red in sight. You press your palm flat against the glass and close your eyes, reaching the way BB taught you. Not with your hands but with the part of you that connects to the hum, the part that learned to feel Level 0's frequency like a second heartbeat—

Nothing.

“BB,” you call out. Into the glass and beyond it. “BB, please, answer me. BB?”

Nothing. The window is cold under your hand. He always answers you. Always. From any level, from any distance.

“Who's BB?”

Bobby. Behind you. Standing by the kitchen table, a scone untouched in his hand, watching you with an expression that has shifted from shock to something more complicated. Suspicious, calculating.

You turn back to face the window. “Not now.”

“You just called someone's name into a window. In a house inside a nightmare. I think now is pretty much exactly when.”

“Bobby—”

“Is it a person? Another… another one of those things, like the tall one? Are you with someone down here?” He sets the scone on the table. His frown deepens when you don’t correct him. “What—is he your new boyfriend or something? Does he have a face, at least?”

The laugh that comes out of you is ugly. Short, throaty, carrying a bitterness you didn't know you had room for on top of everything else. You turn from the window, glaring, ignoring the pang of relief, love, and warmth you feel at the sight of him despite it all.

“You don't get to ask me that.”

“I don't get to—I just found you. I've been looking for you for eighteen months. I sat in a basement and talked to a goddamn wall for seven months because I thought—because I hoped— nd you're down here with a name for someone and—”

“And what, Bobby? What were you doing while you were sitting in that basement? Because it looks like you were doing pretty well.” Your eyes cut to Kat, who’s standing by the counter with a scone in her hand and her face pinched still. “Looks like you bounced back just fine.”

The room goes quiet. 

Bobby stares at you. The hurt on his face is immediate, unguarded, a direct hit. The flinch he didn't have time to armour against, the naked impact of being told by the woman he's been grieving that his grief wasn't enough. His jaw tightens, eyes hardening.

“You think I bounced back?” Low. Dangerous. Bobby's edge, the blade under the casual, the sharp thing that used to make you go quiet, except right now it's not going to make you go quiet because you’ve spent months in the impossible learning how to not go quiet. “You think—do you have any idea what it was like? You disappeared. You just vanished. No note, no call, no body, nothing. The cops thought I killed you. They hauled me in, sat me down and looked at me like I was something he scraped off his shoe. I sat there, and I took it because what was I gonna say? She up and vanished? The neighbours heard us fighting. Terrence would barely talk to me unless it's about searching for you. People won’t look at me around town. My own mother—”

“Bobby, maybe this isn't the—” Kat starts.

“And the tapes.” Bobby's voice cracks, just slightly. A tiny fracture in the anger and grief. “The tapes went blank. All of them. Every single one. Years of footage and it just—you just—disappeared. From the tapes, from people's memories, from everything. Terrence couldn't remember what you looked like. My mom called you 'Bobby's friend.' Nobody remembered you. Nobody, except me. And I thought I was losing my fucking mind because I could remember and no one else could, and the tapes were blank and you were gone and I had nothing, nothing—”

“I'm sure your new girlfriend was very comforting,” you cut in coolly. “In your grief.”

The words come out serrated. Cruel. You hear them leave your mouth, and you can feel the wrongness of them, the unfairness. This woman is standing three feet away, and you don't know her. You’re aiming your pain at her like a weapon because she's standing next to Bobby and keeping his name in her mouth, and the alternative is aiming the anger at yourself.

Kat's face goes white. Then red. Her hand tightens around the scone, and she sets it down on the counter, carefully, the controlled gesture of a woman who’s choosing her next words carefully.

“I kept him alive,” Kat says. Quiet. Level. A statement of fact delivered with a steady gaze. “When everyone else gave up or thought he was a killer, I was there. Every night. I didn't leave.”

Your mouth compresses into a bloodless line. “How noble.”

“You left.”

“I didn't leave, I—”

“I know, I’m sorry that came out wrong.” Kat's voice doesn't rise. It drops, gets quieter. Gets closer to the bone. “I know something happened to you. Clearly. Since you’re here. I know you didn't choose this. But he didn't know that. He sat in a basement for seven months talking to an empty wall, and then Clark kicked him out, and he sat in a parking lot, screaming at me because he couldn't scream at you, and I stayed. I stayed when everyone else left. So don't stand there and act like I stole something from you. I picked up what you couldn't carry anymore because you weren’t there."

The room vibrates. Not with sound. With the tension of three people, holding pain that doesn't fit. Pain that belongs to eighteen months of separation and misunderstanding and choices made in the dark by people who were all, in their own ways, trying to survive.

Bobby is looking at you. His eyes are red, jaw set, his hands fisted at his sides.

“It took months,” he chokes out. “It took months after Clark kicked me out. Months before—before anything. I was a wreck, and she was kind to me. I pushed her away, and I pushed her away, and I pushed her away, and eventually I—” He swallows thickly. “I had nothing. You were gone. The tapes were gone. And I had to—I had to keep living, baby. I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I kept living.”

“I'm sure it was very hard," you bite out coldly. “Having to move on after seven whole months.”

“Seven months of sitting on a concrete floor talking to you.” Bobby takes a step toward you. His voice rising now, the anger competing with the grief, both of them pushing through the cracks in his face. “Seven months of bringing you coffee, your order, every night, and pouring it down the drain at two in the morning because you weren't there to drink it. Seven months of sleeping on your side of the bed because it still smelled like you for the first three weeks, and then it didn't, and that was worse. Seven months of saying I love you to a wall, night after night after night, and the wall never answered. So yeah. Yeah, it was hard. Sorry, it wasn't long enough for you.”

“Then maybe you should have told me you loved me before I disappeared.”

The words come out cold. A scalpel drawn across the exact right vein, delivered with a fury so controlled it's almost calm, practically a snarl. Your jaw sits tight, and your eyes burn, voice carrying the compressed weight of every night you lay three feet from Bobby in the dark and wondered if you were still visible.

“Maybe if you'd said it once—” Your voice cracks. Splits. Your anger rises like bile, flooding your throat, and you can feel it. The rage, the one BB heard through the wall, the one you buried under self-doubt and swallowed until it poisoned you. It's here. Right here. Pressing against your teeth, trying to get out. “Maybe if you'd just—maybe—”

You stop.

Your jaw clamps shut, your hands fisted at your sides. You can feel the anger writhing in your chest, trying to claw its way up your throat, and you swallow it. Again. The way you've always swallowed it. Push it down. Fold it in. Turn it inward because the alternative is letting it out, and if you let it out, you don't know what might happen, you don't know what it might burn down, you don't know—

In the corner of the room, Mr Kitty tips his head.

A slow, measured tilt. His blank face angling toward you with a quality of attention that's different from his usual patient stillness. Then the moment passes, and Mr Kitty's head straightens again. 

Bobby is staring at you. The anger on his face has fractured. What's underneath it is worse. Hurt, raw and exposed. Kat stands at the counter behind him with her arms crossed and her face closed. The hurt she's refusing to show bleeds through anyway, visible in the set of her mouth and the brightness of her dark eyes.

You're about to speak. The words are loaded, chambered, aimed—the doorway, the grunt, the don't wait up, the months of feeling like furniture in your shared apartment and now learning it took him seven whole months of dramatic wall-performances before he found a fucking replacement—

And then you hear what he said.

You hear it. Underneath the anger, underneath the accusations. The specific, factual content buried in the grief.

Seven months of sitting on a concrete floor talking to you.

The basement. Clark's basement. The storage level, the concrete floor, and the wall that breathes. 

Bobby sat in the basement and talked to the wall you fell through. For seven months. Talked to you, through the wall, the same wall that separates the real world from the Backrooms, the same wall that BB sat on the other side of and listened through. BB heard you through the wall. That's what he told you himself. I heard you. From the other side.

If BB heard you through the wall, then BB heard Bobby, too. Bobby's voice, Bobby's grief, Bobby's confessions and apologies poured into concrete for seven months. BB heard a man sitting on the other side of the wall begging you to come back, searching for you, refusing to give up.

BB heard all of it.

BB knew Bobby was looking for you. Knew Bobby loved you. Bobby was sitting three inches of concrete away from the woman BB was holding in the dark, and BB said nothing. BB held you while you cried about Bobby's indifference, and he said it was never you, it was his malfunction, and he knew (he knew) that Bobby was on the other side of that wall. 

He chose, deliberately, consciously, with the full weight of whatever passes for his moral compass, to keep that from you.

BB let you believe Bobby didn't care.

BB let you grieve a living man.

And the worst part—the part that makes your vision narrow and your hands shake and something hot and corrosive flood the back of your throat—is that it worked. It worked. 

You grieved Bobby. You swallowed the anger, folded the hurt inward, and accepted BB's version of the story. He got scared and retreated; that's his malfunction, not yours. 

You let it hollow you out, let it carve the space that BB then filled, and the filling felt like love. The forehead kisses. The promise. The apartment he built for you, the bookshelves by colour, the way he learned to dance and to kiss and to hold you through nightmares. All of it—every tenderness, every moment you thought this is what it feels like to be seen, to be loved—was planted in soil he'd poisoned. 

He didn't just withhold information. He cultivated your grief. He let the hurt grow until it choked out everything else, until Bobby was a wound instead of a person, until you stopped hoping for the door back because what was the point of a door that opened onto a man who didn't love you?

Except Bobby loved you. Bobby loved you the whole time. He loved you so much he sat on a concrete floor for seven months saying it to a wall that wouldn't answer and BB was on the other side of that wall listening and he heard every word and he held your face and said how odd and kissed your forehead and never once, not once, said he's looking for you, he's right there, he hasn't stopped.

The realisation doesn't land like a blow. It lands like a floor giving way. Every tender moment. Every I heard you and nobody else did. Every forehead kiss, every promise, every night in the nest with his cool hand on your back and his hum in your bones. 

All of it built on an omission so vast it restructures everything it touches.

You want to scream. Want to put your fist through the window of this safe house and scream BB's name into the amber light and demand—demand—that he explain himself, that he look at you with those borrowed eyes and tell you why. 

Why did he let you believe you were forgotten? Why did he let you ache for a man who was aching back, three inches of concrete and a universe apart, both of you reaching for each other in the dark while the thing between you held you close and said I've got you, baby, nothing touches you.

Nothing touches you. Because BB made sure nothing reached you. Not even the truth.

Part of you—small, stubborn, lodged behind your ribs like a splinter—whispers that he did it because he loves you. 

That the omission wasn't deliberate cruelty but desperation. That BB heard Bobby through the wall and understood, with the clarity of a thing that’s never been loved or chosen, that the truth would take you away from him. That the choice was between honesty and losing the only person who ever said his name kindly. And the whisper sounds like BB’s voice, and it sounds like the hum. It makes your eyes burn because you understand desperation and loneliness, you understand choosing wrong because the right choice is unbearable—isn't that exactly what Bobby did? What you did by choosing to stay? 

Isn't that the whole stupid, devastating circle? Bobby loved you and showed it by looking away. BB loved you and showed it by keeping you blind.

The whisper doesn't survive the inferno in your chest.

He knew. He knew. And he kept you anyway.

Your mouth opens. The questions forming on your tongue, taking shape, gaining mass—

A crack splits the room. Structural, not sonic. The walls of the house shudder. The windows fracture, the glass spiderwebbing from the centre to the frame in a pattern that resembles stress lines. Kat screams, a sharp, yelping sound. Mr Kitty straightens to his full height, his dark shape pressing against the ceiling, his blank face oriented toward the source of the disturbance with a sudden, absolute alertness.

Bobby is wrenched forward.

One second, he's standing by the kitchen table. The next he's airborne, yanked off his feet by a force that crosses the room faster than sight, faster than the sound that follows it. A percussive boom that blows the scones off the counter and knocks Kat sideways. 

Bobby slams into the far wall, and the wall cracks behind him. He's pinned there, three feet off the ground, his feet dangling, his hands clawing at the thing around his throat.

BB's hand.

BB is in the room. Not entered, arrived, the air displacing around his sudden presence with a pressure change you feel in your sinuses. 

He's holding Bobby against the wall by the throat, one-handed, arm extended, and the face he's wearing is Bobby's face, but it's not—it's wrong, more animal than human, the features sharpened past recognition, the jaw too wide, the teeth visible behind lips that have pulled back in a snarl that doesn't belong on any human mouth. His eyes are black. Fully black. The fissures from the fight are still visible, tiny cracks radiating from his jaw and cheekbones, leaking that colourless light, the mask of Bobby held together by fury and will and nothing else.

One arm hangs at an angle that isn't right. Dark, viscous blood streaks his chest, his neck, his hair. The crop top is torn. The chain is broken, hanging from one side of his throat. He looks like he walked through a war to get here, and the war isn't over; it's just been put on pause long enough for him to cross the Backrooms and find the one thing in his territory that doesn't belong.

Bobby chokes. His feet kick. His hands grab BB's wrist, but BB doesn't move, doesn't register the resistance, a marble statue with a throat in its hand.

BB leans in. Close. His face inches from Bobby's, the original and the copy, face to face at last, the man and the thing that chose his face. Bobby's eyes are wide, bulging, filled with a terror that’s different from any terror he’s ever felt because he’s looking into his own features and finding nothing human behind them.

BB bares his bloodied teeth, snarling low in his chest. 

“How dare you be here?”