Mando Mode 🌱

You weren’t having a very good day. Not like any day could be considered ‘good’ since entering this hell hole. But this particular day was a bit atrocious due to the screaming. Someone new must have entered Level 0 and it had found them. You had done a pretty good job at avoiding that new thing ever since it spawned from wherever they came from but you still caught glimpses and well, smells from its lair.

So you shouldered the backpack and went towards the lair’s location. Don’t let anyone say you weren’t a nice person. Plus it would mean company that wasn’t an ominous sound or the hazmat suits. That is if the thing has decided not to eat the survivors yet.

“People really have to go about messing with things huh?” You muttered out loud as you saw the couch, the ramp and the remains of a rope lying in the entrance. You picked your way over the furniture and slid down quickly. Landing on the damp carpet.

It was the smell that hit you first. You always hated coming down here, it made you want to gag up the small amount of food you had managed to force down your throat that morning.

“Fuck, eww, okay focus.” You picked yourself off the floor and headed towards the horizontal door, you didn’t like heading off through the different areas of this section. Just in and out. Rescue mission, okay. Like this wasn’t going to get you killed.

Pressing yourself up to the door you listened closely: nothing. The entity must have moved away to hunt, there was still a chance that the person might still be alive.

“In and out. In and out.” You repeated under your breath, whispering but still trying to reassure yourself. You turned the door knob and pulled the door open slowly. You shined the flashlight you had managed to find on one of the expeditions and found the cold, dank room smiling back at you.

There was nothing in the main atrium (?) but the corridors that led out seemed to be pulsing. The sounds of roaring were not far off. You quickly scanned each of the corridors until you suddenly stopped short.

At the far end of one of the hallways there was still a person. A person that was clearly breathing. You inched over to the person - a man with a white shirt, jeans and blonde hair. A man who was very much alive but bleeding freely from his leg. Moving quickly, you pulled off your backpack and grabbed the shirt you had stashed in there.

“Hi, are you okay? Are you awake?” You said as loudly as you dared to the man in front of you. He groaned loudly in response and you shushed him. The shirt thankfully wrapped around his jean covered thigh and you made a makeshift tourniquet. Stopping the worst of the blood flow.

“Can you get up? Dude, I need some help here, I don’t think I can haul you out myself.” You lightly shook the guy’s shoulder and he winced before his eyes slowly blinked open. And then it hit him where he was and what had just happened, it was like you watched him calculate your features in real time.

“Are you one of them? Where is Kat? Where is that thing?”

“Look, you need to be quiet, we need to get out of here. Before that thing comes back.” You whispered back and he nodded back - clearly still in shock. You put your backpack back on and slowly helped him back up.

“I know the way out this area but we’re going to need to climb. Do you think you can do that?”

“I-uh, I can try.”

“You better or else we’re both done for.” As if the thing heard you stealing his precious catch, a loud resounding roar echoed from one of the hallways. Followed by two screams. “Don’t focus on them, we can’t fight that thing. The only possible thing we can do is get the hell out of here. Now come on.”

Somehow it felt like the walk back to the door was longer. Like the hallways were in league with that inhuman thing. Or maybe it was just the giant weight of a man hanging off the side of you.

When your flashlight finally shined off the painted wood of the door you almost let out a shriek of joy. You moved quicker than before, dragging the guy in an effort to get to the door faster but when you reached it you suddenly remembered your survival instincts. And pressed your ear to the door before slowly pulling it up and open.

The smell hit you once again, not just damp but a mixture of saliva, blood, mold and decomposition seemed to emanate from the place.

“Okay we’re almost there, in you go.” You push the guy through first and then follow him before closing the door behind you both. Taking a deep (and slightly strangling) breath you grab hold of his left arm and pull it around your shoulders again. The rope was still hanging down through the ramp and you just realized that a part of that rope was hanging off him as well.

“Still okay?” His blue eyes met yours and he gave a weak smirk.

“Never better.”

“Okay so I’ll grab the rope and you can hold onto me as we both climb up. How does that sound?”

“Is that going to work?”

“We don’t really have options right now.”

“Okay.”

You nod and then approach the steep incline, you wrap your hand around the rope and that’s when you realize your hands are trembling. This was the longest conversation you’ve had with someone other than yourself in so long. The relief mixed with the excitement and adrenaline were doing horrors to your regulatory system but you had to get out of here. No use thinking about anything other than survival, although this was the first kernel of hope there had been in this awful place in so very long.

You start to pull yourself inch by inch and once you’re up a bit into the shaft, you slide down and smile at the guy.

“I think if you grab my backpack I should be able to pull us both up but you’re going to also need to put some weight on your legs to give us a push up. We have one chance at this.”

The guy’s face blanched and he smiled nervously before nodding his head. You were going to have to rely on adrenaline and the time spent climbing in this place to get the fuck out of the thing’s lair. It was now or never.

You smiled reassuringly at the guy and then turned around and grabbed the rope again. You felt his hands go around the straps of your backpack and you almost jolted. He had warm hands and they were touching you, even in the face of death you felt something akin to happiness to feel another person’s touch. It had been so long. Everything had been so long ago.

That was when you started pulling yourself up and using your legs against the floor (?) as leverage. He at least seemed to be doing his part because it wasn’t too hard for the first half of the shaft. Then it got a bit steeper. And it got harder and the muscles in your body started screaming.

If you let go, you die. If you let go, you die. If you let go, you die. If you let go, you die. If you let go, you die. If you let go, you die.

Those words kept spinning in your head as the rope started to cut the circulation in your hands and the straps of the backpack started to make what seemed like a permanent groove into your body. Literally dragging someone and your own body up a shaft was not a piece of cake. But this meant having someone to talk to, to help, to protect and if getting that would kill you then so be it.

So you kept going, you kept going as sweat pooled in the concaves of your body and your scalp became itchy. You pulled yourself up and you pulled this random person up and up and up. Sisyphus, look at me now asshole. 

And then you saw it, that stupid patterned couch that was holding you up was just inches away. So you pulled yourself up one last time and rested on the headboard of the couch. The guy finally detaches himself from you and it was a relief like no other. Both of your feet were now dangling into the abyss.

“I’m Bobby by the way.” He whispers and you look over to the man you dragged from the brink of death itself and you smile.

“It’s nice to meet you Bobby.”

After resting for a very short period of time, you grabbed the guy, Bobby, again and stumbled back through the now-familiar hallways. You were going back to your base (?), lair (?), home. It changed on what felt like a weekly basis, depending on the appearance of entities, hazmat people and the hellhole itself.

“Where are we going?”

“Somewhere safe. I should be able to patch that up there.” You whisper, nodding your head down to his bandaged thigh. The blood had started to seep onto the orange shirt and all the movement definitely wasn’t helping it. You just hope the thing hadn’t clipped an artery.

“Who are you?”

“It’s a long story, I’ll tell you once we don’t have to whisper like this.” You wink and at least you get a strained huff and smile from Bobby.

“Isn’t it safe now though?” You shake your head and then motion him to stop. Urging him to experience the atmosphere of the place. The ever-constant hum of the lights, the sickly yellow of the walls that seemed to close in around you once you stop moving, the feeling of the floor breathing under your shoes and the sound of distant movement.

“This place, this level used to be fairly safe and then the thing that took you appeared. It likes to stalk its victims. So I’m taking you to a different area. One that is a little less… claustrophobic?”

The both of you start moving again and you turn right at the next junction to find yourself in the tiled pool space. Bobby eyes flash to yours but you’re currently focusing on not slipping on the tile and not letting him slip either.

“Not here either.” You say as you keep walking. 

And you walk for a lot longer than it took you to find him and the others in the first place. Bobby was getting weaker, you could feel him leaning more and more of his weight on your body. Not that it didn’t feel nice to have another warm body on yours but it was starting to concern you how much his leg was dragging. So you decided to take the shortcut. The one that led through the hotel.

You held him closer when you first passed onto the carpeted floors, you had both been silent most of the walk but now you looked at him and pressed your finger to your lips. It was imperative that he stayed quiet in this place. You knew the route like the back of your hand but if you made a noise or tripped or even looked at a door wrong you knew that there was no chance you were getting out of there alive.

So you walked slowly, quietly, with intention. The fastest way through was in the kitchens and then the manager’s office and then you would get to home. You held onto Bobby tightly, so tightly that he had shot you strange glances as you walked through the plush hotel lobby. The patterns on the floor always reminded you of that movie where the dad went crazy and tried to kill his family during a snowstorm.

The hotel had an eerie quality, not just because of what lurked in its walls but because of the way you knew someone had been here before. This was one of the levels you had explored that felt like it had housed a great number of people before whatever happened, happened. It was not just a distorted memory of a place but a pretty picture perfect replica of a place.

And now you were invading its territory with a bleeding man. Usually you only came here for the meagre amount of food the kitchen used to hold. Now this was more than life and death, it was your sanity.

When you finally reached the swinging doors that led into the kitchen, you tapped Bobby on the shoulder and strained a smile. His eyes were lidded and he was desperately trying to hold on. He didn’t look good.

You pushed the swinging door and went through, and then you walked and walked and walked until you reached the manager’s office and then you kept walking again. Until you reached the red emergency door with the upside down number panel code next to it. You looked around the dimly lit corridor and then pulled open the door before shoving Bobby in and quickly banging the door shut behind you - ensuring that it was fully closed. Just as you heard the familiar shriek of something inhuman on the other side. It sent a wave of shivers down your body and made gooseflesh appear on your arms.

“What the hell is that?”

“You don’t want to know. They tend to like that particular area of the hotel but they can’t get through, don’t worry. We’re here.” You pointed to the harshly lit office space with windows looking out into nothing and rows upon rows of cubicles going as far as the eye could see.

“This is safe?”

“Nothing likes it here. I think it’s too boring or too mechanical or something. Really shows you how much the office spaces sucks the soul of all things that inhabit it. Come on, let’s get you fixed up.”

“You still haven’t told me anything about yourself, all I know is your name and that you saved me.” Bobby said, panting slightly as he hobbled next to you over to one of the cubicles at the far left side, right in front of the windows.

“I promised I’d tell you once we’re safe. You can stop whispering too, by the way.” You motioned to the spinny chair that was in the cubicle and helped him sit down. Bobby let out a sigh of relief and closed his eyes for a moment.

“You’re not one of the things are you?”

“An entity? No.” You focus on rifling through your backpack and pulling out a bottle of water and a shirt. You also tried in vain to find if you had anything antiseptic, the water would have to do.

“Uh Bobby you’re going to need to take off your jeans.” You said, slightly sheepishly once you turned back to the man and found him looking at you with a questioning look on his face. It was strange how after so long in this place that literally and figuratively ate people you were still a girl after all.

“You could at least take me out on a date first.” Bobby smirked slightly but then started hiking up the remainder of the rope and unbuckling his belt. You turned around, in an effort to give him some privacy even though it was probably too late for that. Plus he had mentioned someone named Kat. You couldn’t just start jumping his bones just because he was the first human you had seen in months? Years? Decades?

“Ready.” You turn back towards him and then zero in on the orange shirt that he was pressing onto a gash in his left leg. The shirt was absolutely destroyed, soaked through with blood and it seemed to have started to drip as well.

“Okay, are you hurt anywhere else?”

“No, at least I don’t think so. My head hurts pretty bad and my shoulder is bruised to hell but that’s really bugging me.” He cracks a strained smile as you nod and then kneel down in front of him and urge him to move his hand from the wound. You were so close to his goddamn boxers but right now your attention zeroed in on the freely bleeding gash. 

You could almost see the layers of muscle from how deep it was. You bit your lip in contemplation and then told him to place the shirt back on the cut.

“That is really fucking deep, I’m surprised you even managed to walk on that thing. It looks like it needs stitches and I don’t have that. I think the best thing we can do is stuff it with something to stop the bleeding and then wrap it.”

“I’m at your disposal doc.” Bobby tilted his head and gave you a soft little smile but you could see the panic in his eyes. A panic you had been intimately familiar with since you somehow landed in this mess. It was that primal panic that made your life flash before your eyes as you fell down or a car whizzed past a little too close. He didn’t know if he was going to make it out of this alive.

“Listen to me, Bobby. You’re going to be okay. I swear on my life, I will make you better. I haven’t survived this long to lose someone just because of a little scratch. Okay?”

“Okay.”

. . .

1958

The spider moved carefully across Henry Creel’s palm, its legs thin as black thread against the pale cup of his hand.

He sat in the grass near the edge of the yard, knees bent, head lowered, watching it with the sort of attention he rarely gave to people. People were too loud. Too obvious. Too eager to prove they were ordinary, like dogs pressing their noses against a fence and barking at anything that dared to pass.

Spiders were different.

They did not pretend.

This one stepped over the curve of his lifeline, delicate and sure, as if it knew exactly where it meant to go. Henry held still for it. He liked the feeling of its tiny feet against his skin, liked the patience required to keep from frightening it. There was something honest in such a small creature carrying so much fear inside other people.

Behind him, through the living room window, the television flickered.

His parents were watching the news.

Henry could not hear much of it from outside. Only the muted rhythm of a man’s voice coming through the glass, flat and grave, swallowed by the hum of evening insects and the distant pulse of sirens somewhere far off in Hawkins. The words came in broken pieces, too muffled to fully understand.

Tragic incident.

Hawkins High School.

Senior prom.

Electrical malfunction.

Multiple students.

Dead.

Henry did not turn around at first.

He kept his eyes on the spider.

Inside the house, the blue-white glow of the television flashed across the window. His father’s shape stood stiff near the sofa. His mother sat closer to the screen, one hand pressed over her mouth.

Henry could see her face reflected in the glass.

That was what made him look up.

Virginia Creel was not crying. Not exactly. His mother was very good at keeping herself arranged, very good at folding horror into something presentable. But her expression had changed. Her eyes were wide and wet-looking, her lips parted around some prayer or gasp she had not let out.

She looked frightened.

Not sad.

Frightened.

Henry stared at her reflection, curious despite himself.

Then something moved beyond it.

At first, he thought it was only another trick of the glass, a smear of shadow, a pale shape crossing behind his mother’s reflected face. But then the shape stepped into the glow of a streetlamp, and Henry’s fingers went still.

A girl was walking down the road.

Barefoot.

Her shoes were gone.

She moved slowly, as if every step had to be remembered before she could take it. Her feet were dark against the pavement, one of them leaving faint marks behind her. Her dress, once pretty, hung from her like a ruined flower. Pale fabric clung to her knees and waist, soaked through in places with something too dark to be rain.

Blood.

It was everywhere.

On her skirt. On her arms. Streaked at her throat. Dried along one side of her face where it had tangled with her hair. The curls or waves someone must have tried to arrange for her had fallen loose, wild around her shoulders, pins hanging uselessly like broken little stars.

Henry knew her.

Not well.

No one knew her well.

She was the sophomore girl from Hawkins High, the one who always walked with her books pressed tight to her chest, as if holding them there could keep the world from touching her. The one with the long skirts, the plain blouses, the sleeves buttoned at her wrists even when the weather turned warm. The one other students whispered about with cruel little smiles. 

He had seen her before.

In town. Outside the school. Once in the grocery store with her mother gripping her arm hard enough to leave finger marks.

She was always looking down.

But not now.

Now her head was lifted slightly, her face empty in a way that made Henry’s chest feel strangely hollow. Not peaceful. Not calm. Empty, the way a house looked after a fire had eaten through the rooms and left only the shape of where a life had been.

And still, even covered in blood, Henry noticed what no one else would have.

She was beautiful.

Not in the shiny, laughing way the girls at school tried to be. Not like the girls who curled their hair and painted their mouths and learned how to smile so people would look. Her beauty was quieter than that. Stranger. Like a saint in a cracked church window. Like a doll left too long in the rain. Like something delicate that had been mistaken for weak until it shattered in someone’s hand.

The spider reached the edge of his palm.

Henry did not feel it at first.

He was watching her.

The girl slowed.

For one moment, she seemed to sense him there in the yard. Her head turned, and her eyes found his through the dark.

Henry stopped breathing.

The streetlamp threw a thin, golden line across her face. Her eyes were wide, glassy, and terribly alive. They did not look like the eyes of a girl who had walked away from an accident. They looked like the eyes of someone who had seen the inside of the world and found it rotten.

She stared at him.

He stared back.

Neither of them spoke.

Inside the house, the television continued flickering. His mother’s reflected face hovered in the window like a ghost, pale with fear. His father shifted behind her. Somewhere far away, another siren rose and fell.

Henry thought, suddenly and with a sharpness that startled him, that he should do something.

Step forward.

Say her name.

Ask what happened.

Ask if she was hurt.

But the thought came and died in the same breath.

He imagined his mother seeing. His father opening the door. The neighbors peering through curtains. The police asking why Henry Creel had been outside speaking to the blood-covered girl from Hawkins High.

He imagined the whispers turning.

Not just about her.

About him.

So he stayed still.

The spider slipped from his palm into the grass.

The tiny loss broke whatever spell had held him. Henry looked down quickly, searching between the blades for the black shape, but it had already vanished into the dark.

When he looked back up, the road was empty.

The girl was gone.

Only the streetlamp remained, buzzing faintly above the pavement, shining on nothing at all.

. . .

Y/N did not remember the walk home ending.

One moment, there had been pavement beneath her bare feet and streetlights above her head, humming like tired insects. The next, she was standing on the porch of her childhood home with blood drying stiff on her dress and her hand wrapped around the doorknob.

For a few seconds, she only stared at it.

The brass was cold against her palm.

Inside, the house was quiet.

Not peaceful quiet. Never that. The house had never known peace. It was the kind of quiet that waited with its teeth hidden, the kind that made her shoulders pull inward before anything had even happened.

Y/N pushed the door open.

The smell of lemon polish and old wood met her first. Then candle wax. Then the faint, sour scent of her mother’s perfume.

“Momma?” she called.

Her voice barely sounded like her own. It was small and scraped thin, like someone had dragged it over broken glass.

There was no answer.

Y/N stepped inside, leaving faint red marks on the floorboards behind her. Her eyes moved over the familiar room in pieces: the worn rug, the stiff-backed sofa, the Bible open on the side table, the little wooden crosses nailed above every doorway as if God needed directions.

She wanted her mother.

That was the worst part.

After everything, after the laughter and the blood and the screams folding into each other until the whole gymnasium became one terrible sound, Y/N wanted her mother. She wanted arms around her. She wanted someone to say it was over. She wanted, foolishly, desperately, to be somebody’s child.

Her mother appeared in the hall.

For one fragile second, neither of them moved.

Her mother wore her robe over her nightdress, hair pinned back so tightly it pulled at her temples. Her eyes traveled over Y/N slowly, from the ruined hem of her dress to the blood on her throat, to the mess of her hair, to her bare feet.

Y/N’s lips trembled.

“Momma,” she whispered.

Her mother’s face changed.

Not with relief.

With horror.

Then disgust.

“I knew it,” her mother breathed.

Y/N took a step toward her anyway. “Please—”

“I knew it was in you.”

The words struck harder than a hand. Y/N stopped in the middle of the room, chest rising and falling too fast beneath the sticky weight of her dress.

“They laughed at me,” she said, and the words came out broken, childlike. “They all laughed at me like you said.”

Her mother’s mouth twisted.

“Because they saw you.”

Y/N blinked.

A tear slipped down her cheek, cutting through the blood like rain through dirt.

Her mother moved fast.

The slap snapped Y/N’s face to the side.

For a moment, all she could hear was the ringing in her ear.

Then another hit came. A hand to her shoulder. Fingers biting into her arm. Her mother shook her once, hard enough that Y/N’s teeth clicked together.

“You wicked girl,” her mother hissed. “You filthy, wicked girl.”

“I didn’t mean to,” Y/N cried. “I didn’t mean to, I didn’t—”

“Liar.”

The lamps flickered.

Neither of them noticed at first.

Her mother shoved her backward, and Y/N stumbled against the edge of the sofa. Her knees nearly gave out. She grabbed at the fabric to steady herself, leaving red smears across the faded flowers.

“I was right,” her mother said, voice rising. “All these years, I was right. I tried to beat it out of you. I tried to pray it out of you. I tried to save you from what you are.”

Y/N shook her head, sobbing now. “Please, Momma, please don’t—”

“They laughed because they knew.” Her mother pointed toward the door as if the whole town stood outside listening. “They saw the devil wearing my daughter’s face.”

The lights flickered again.

The Bible pages on the side table fluttered though no window was open.

Y/N pressed a trembling hand to her mouth.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

Her mother’s eyes sharpened at that.

“Then pray.”

Y/N froze.

Her mother grabbed her by the wrist and dragged her toward the little corner of the parlor where a wooden crucifix hung above a narrow kneeling bench. Y/N had spent half her childhood there, knees aching, hands clasped until her fingers went numb.

“No,” Y/N whispered.

Her mother yanked harder.

“On your knees.”

“Momma, please—”

“On. Your. Knees.”

She forced her down.

Y/N hit the floor hard, pain bursting through her knees. She folded instinctively, shoulders hunched, head bowed, hands coming together because her body remembered obedience even when her mind was falling apart.

The house groaned around them.

Her mother stood behind her, breathing heavily.

“Beg,” she snapped. “You beg Him to forgive you.”

Y/N stared at the crucifix through blurred eyes.

The figure nailed there looked back at her with carved wooden sorrow.

She did not know what to say.

All her life, she had prayed to be good. To be normal. To be quiet enough, clean enough, small enough. She had prayed until the words became stones in her mouth. She had prayed while her mother stood behind her and told her every strange thing inside her was sin.

And still, the blood had come.

Still, the gym had screamed.

Still, everyone had looked at her like she was a monster.

“Pray,” her mother snarled.

Y/N squeezed her eyes shut.

“Our Father,” she whispered, voice shaking, “who art in Heaven…”

The walls gave a low creak.

“Hallowed be Thy name.”

A picture frame rattled on the wall.

“Thy kingdom come…”

Her mother’s breathing changed behind her.

“Thy will be done…”

Something cold touched Y/N’s back.

At first, she did not understand it.

Then the pain came.

Sharp.

Deep.

White-hot.

Y/N’s prayer broke into a strangled gasp.

She looked down, stunned, as if her body belonged to someone else. Her hands opened against her lap. The room tilted. Behind her, her mother made a sound that was almost a sob and almost a laugh as she held a bloodied kitchen knife in her hand. 

“I won’t let Him have to look at you anymore,” her mother whispered.

For a second, Y/N was only a girl.

A hurt girl.

A frightened girl.

A girl who had come home wanting comfort and found the final proof that there had never been any waiting for her.

Then something inside her opened.

Not like a door.

Like a wound.

The lamps exploded.

Glass burst outward in glittering sprays. The crucifix ripped itself from the wall and flew across the room. Her mother stumbled back with a cry, but Y/N did not turn around. She stayed on her knees, eyes wide and wet, breath coming in little broken pulls.

The house began to shake.

Not all at once. First the floorboards trembled beneath her. Then the walls. Then the ceiling groaned overhead, dust raining down like pale ash.

Her mother screamed her name.

Y/N heard it as if from underwater.

Every candle in the room flared high, flames stretching thin and bright. The Bible pages whipped back and forth violently, tearing loose one by one. The little crosses above the doorways cracked down the middle.

“No,” her mother gasped. “No, no, no—”

Y/N turned.

Her eyes were no longer soft.

The fear was still there, but it had changed shape. It had teeth now. It had hands. It had spent sixteen years being swallowed and had finally clawed its way back up.

Her mother stared at her.

For the first time in Y/N’s life, the woman looked afraid of what she had made.

Y/N did not speak.

She only cried.

The force of it tore through the room.

Furniture slammed against the walls. Windows shattered inward. The ceiling split with a sound like thunder cracking open above them. Her mother was thrown back, disappearing into the chaos of splintered wood and falling plaster.

The house screamed.

Or maybe Y/N did.

It was impossible to tell.

The walls bent inward as if some giant hand had wrapped around the home and squeezed. The staircase buckled. The roof groaned. Smoke curled from the curtains where candleflame kissed fabric and spread. Fire crawled up the walls, orange and hungry, lighting the room in flashes like the last moments of the prom all over again.

Y/N staggered to her feet.

Pain ripped through her back, and she nearly fell, catching herself on the edge of the broken kneeling bench. Her blood dripped onto the floorboards, mixing with the trail she had already left behind.

“Momma?” she whispered.

There was no answer.

Only the crackle of fire.

Only the groan of the house coming apart.

Y/N looked around at the place that had kept her small. The prayers. The locked doors. The hands. The rules. The shame pressed into every corner like dust.

And then the house gave way.

By the time the neighbors came running, there was little left but flame and ruin.

By the time the police arrived, the fire had chewed through most of the roof.

By the time the men from the laboratory stepped out of their black cars, Y/N was sitting in the ashes of her childhood home, still wearing the ruined prom dress, her knees drawn to her chest and her eyes fixed on nothing.

She did not look up when they called her name.

She did not cry when they covered her shoulders with a blanket.

She did not ask where her mother was.

The girl who had walked home from prom was gone.

And Hawkins, hungry for a cleaner story, would bury her before morning.

. . . 

1978 

Hawkins Laboratory looked cleaner than it really was.

The floors shone beneath the fluorescent lights, polished to a dull reflection. The walls were white. The doors were white. The coats were white. Everything had been scrubbed and bleached until the building looked less like a place where children cried in their sleep and more like something holy.

Henry Creel knew better.

He walked near the back of the group with his hands folded neatly in front of him, his expression mild, almost empty. Around him, several other orderlies moved with the same careful silence, trained to become part of the hallway rather than people within it.

Dr. Brenner walked ahead of them.

He always did.

The new doctors followed him like parishioners behind a priest, nodding at every word he said, eyes bright with curiosity they mistook for intelligence. They looked at the laboratory as if it were a miracle.

Henry watched them look.

He found it almost funny.

“This wing is restricted for a reason,” Brenner said, his voice calm and practiced. “Much of the work conducted here predates our current program.”

One of the doctors, a young man with nervous hands and glasses too large for his face, glanced toward a sealed door as they passed.

“Predates the children?”

Brenner smiled faintly.

“In a manner of speaking.”

Henry’s eyes shifted toward him.

A manner of speaking.

That was one of Brenner’s favorite ways to lie. It sounded gentler than no. It sounded more educated than yes.

They continued down the corridor. The lights hummed above them. Somewhere behind one of the doors, something metal clattered, followed by the sharp scrape of a chair being dragged across tile.

No one in the group reacted.

They had already been told not to.

Brenner stopped outside a room at the very end of the hall.

Unlike the others, this door had no number printed at eye level. No cheerful color marker. No observation schedule clipped neatly beside it. It was heavier than the rest, reinforced along the frame, with a small rectangular pane of glass set high enough that a child could not have looked through it without standing on their toes.

Henry’s attention sharpened.

He had been in this hall before. He had cleaned it. Carried trays through it. Walked past this door a hundred times with his gaze obediently forward.

The room was never spoken of.

Not by the children.

Not by the orderlies.

Not by anyone who wanted to continue breathing comfortably beneath Brenner’s roof.

“This subject,” Brenner said, “is one of our earliest acquisitions.”

One of the doctors leaned forward slightly. “Acquisitions?”

Brenner did not look at him.

“Yes.”

The word settled into the hallway like dust.

Henry felt something move at the base of his skull.

Not pain. Not exactly.

Recognition before memory.

A faint pressure, like fingertips pressing against the inside of his mind.

Brenner placed one hand near the door, not touching it. Even he seemed to understand there was something different about this room. Something that did not belong to the orderly system he had built out of numbers and punishments and carefully measured rewards.

“She was brought to us in 1958 after an incident in Hawkins,” Brenner continued. “At the time, the event was attributed publicly to electrical failure and structural damage. Privately, it became clear that the situation was… unusual.”

Henry went still.

The year unfolded somewhere deep inside him, old and dark, like a photograph pulled from water.

A road beneath streetlamps.

A blood-soaked dress.

Bare feet against pavement.

Brenner’s voice continued, clean and distant.

“We considered integrating her into the later program, but she proved unsuitable.”

“Unsuitable how?” one of the doctors asked.

Brenner’s expression did not change.

“Her responses were difficult to predict.”

Another doctor glanced toward the sealed door. “Violent?”

“At times.”

The answer was too simple.

Too clean.

Henry’s eyes remained on the little glass window.

“Her condition does not behave as neatly as the others,” Brenner said. “The children can be instructed. Encouraged. Corrected. Their gifts, while varied, are measurable. Hers has always resisted that kind of structure.”

“What can she do?” asked the nervous doctor.

Brenner paused.

Only for a second.

But Henry noticed.

“That is not the question we ask anymore.”

The doctor frowned. “Then what is?”

Brenner looked at the door.

“What happens when she is allowed to?”

The hallway went quiet.

No one asked another question right away.

Brenner clasped his hands behind his back and continued, voice smooth again.

“She is not to have unsupervised contact with the children. Nor with most staff. Prolonged exposure has produced complications in the past.”

“What sort of complications?”

“Unreliable reports,” Brenner said. “Emotional disturbances. Memory irregularities. Physical symptoms without consistent medical cause.”

“That sounds broad.”

“It is.”

“And dangerous?”

Brenner finally turned his head toward the man.

“Everything here is dangerous, Doctor. The difference is that most things here can be taught to sit when asked.”

His gaze returned to the door.

“She does not sit.”

Henry’s fingers curled slightly at his sides.

Inside the room came no sound.

That bothered him more than screaming would have.

“Does she have a designation?” the nervous doctor asked.

“Before our current numbering system, designations were less standardized,” Brenner replied. “In early records, she was referred to as Project Liminal.”

“Liminal?”

“Existing at a threshold.”

“Between what?”

Brenner smiled faintly.

“That has been the matter of debate for nearly twenty years.”

Another doctor looked uncomfortable. “And what do you call her now?”

Brenner’s gaze hardened just slightly.

“Contained.”

No one laughed.

From inside the room, still nothing.

Brenner stepped away from the door, signaling the end of the discussion.

“You will not be assigned to this subject without direct clearance from me. You will not attempt conversation. You will not observe her alone. You will not open that door unless instructed to do so by me personally.”

A woman doctor shifted uneasily. “Is that level of restriction necessary?”

Brenner looked at her.

“Yes.”

That was all.

Not an explanation.

Not a warning.

A fact.

The kind men like Brenner used when they wanted fear to do the rest of the talking.

The group began moving again, white coats shifting like pale wings beneath the fluorescent lights. The orderlies followed. Henry took one step with them.

Then stopped.

No one noticed immediately.

Brenner’s voice continued farther down the hall, already discussing another room, another subject, another living thing reduced to a category. The doctors turned the corner one by one.

Henry remained at the door.

For several seconds, he only listened.

Nothing.

No footsteps inside. No breathing he could hear. No movement.

Only that pressure at the back of his mind, soft and terrible. Familiar in the way childhood nightmares were familiar. In the way old bruises remembered fingers.

Slowly, Henry stepped closer.

The glass panel was narrow and smudged from the outside. He leaned in just enough to see through.

The room beyond was dimmer than the hallway.

Not dark. Brenner would never allow true darkness unless it served a purpose. But the light inside was low, grayish, softened by distance and neglect.

At first, Henry saw only the bed.

Then the wall.

Then a thin figure sitting near the far corner with her knees drawn close, head turned slightly away from the door.

She was older now.

Of course she was.

The girl he remembered had been sixteen and drenched in blood beneath a streetlamp. This woman was no longer that girl, not exactly. Time had sharpened some things and hollowed others. Her hair fell loose around her face. Her skin looked almost colorless beneath the laboratory light. She wore the same plain clothing they gave the others, but on her it seemed less like a uniform and more like another burial shroud.

Still, Henry knew.

Not from her face.

Not first.

From the stillness.

That same terrible emptiness he had seen from the yard all those years ago. The look of a person who had walked out of one life and never been allowed to enter another.

His fingers curled slightly at his sides.

Memory came fully now.

The spider in his palm.

His mother’s frightened reflection in the window.

Sirens.

The road.

The blood.

Her eyes finding his.

And then nothing.

He had done nothing.

Henry stared through the glass, and for the first time in years, something like guilt moved through him.

Not soft guilt. Not human guilt.

Something colder.

Sharper.

A resentment aimed at himself, at Brenner, at the whole rotten little town that had seen two children becoming monsters and had only watched from behind glass.

His lips parted before he decided to speak.

“Y/N.”

The name left him quietly.

Barely more than breath against the door.

But inside the room, her head turned.

Henry’s body went still.

She moved slowly, as if returning from somewhere far away. Her face angled toward the glass. For a moment, the dim light hid her eyes beneath the shadow of her lashes.

Then she looked directly at him.

The hallway seemed to disappear.

No doctors.

No orderlies.

No Brenner’s voice echoing from around the corner.

Only her eyes through the narrow pane of glass, older and emptier than before, but awake. Terribly awake.

Henry felt the pressure in his skull deepen.

Not an attack.

A recognition.

Her gaze searched his face.

He wondered if she remembered him. The boy in the yard. The one who had watched her pass barefoot and bloody and had chosen silence because he was afraid of becoming part of her story.

Her lips parted.

No sound reached him through the door.

But he saw the shape of the word.

Not his name.

She did not know his name.

Not yet.

Her mouth formed something smaller.

A question.

Henry leaned closer to the glass.

For the first time, the faintest expression crossed her face.

Not fear.

Not quite.

Curiosity.

Then, behind him, footsteps approached.

“Peter.”

Henry’s expression emptied at once.

Brenner stood several yards down the hall, watching him with the calm of a man who missed very little and forgave even less.

The doctors were gone. The other orderlies waited behind him, carefully pretending not to stare.

“You were instructed to remain with the group,” Brenner said.

Henry stepped back from the door.

“Yes, sir.”

Brenner’s eyes moved briefly to the glass panel, then back to Henry.

There was a pause.

Small.

Measured.

Dangerous.

“I would advise against developing an interest in this one.”

Henry lowered his gaze with practiced obedience.

“Of course.”

Brenner held him there a moment longer.

Then he turned.

Henry followed.

He did not look back.

Not until they reached the corner.

Only once.

A final glance over his shoulder toward the door at the end of the hall.

Through the little glass panel, Y/N was still watching him.

he stands. carefully. the headphones still over his ears, the music far-away to you but you know every song by heart anyway. you've played this tape so many times the lyrics are tattooed into your bones. you can hear them faintly leaking through the foam padding when you stand close enough, and you intend to stand very close.

"stop thinking," you instruct. you take his hands. place one on your waist. lace your fingers with the other one and hold it up. "just... follow. feel."

you start to sway. small. easy. side to side. he follows. stiff at first, the proportions slightly off, his weight distribution still that almost-human predator's stillness that doesn't translate well to swaying. but he watches your feet. mirrors them. adjusts. learns.

within a minute he's got it. within two he's smiling.

the song changes to something slower (you know because you've timed the order on this side of the tape, you know what comes next) and you pull him closer without thinking and his hand on your waist tightens. his other hand pulls yours up to his chest and you're pressed against him, swaying in the nest, in the fluorescent dark, and he's dancing.

bb is dancing.

your ear is against his chest now, close enough that you can hear the music humming through the headphone foam, faint but recognisable. you mouth the lyrics against his sternum because you know them, you know every word, and he's wearing the song like a halo around his head while you wear it secondhand through the fabric of his shirt.

you start laughing. you can't help it.

it bubbles up. half giddy, half disbelieving, the absurdity of the moment hitting you all at once. you are slow-dancing with an ancient entity on damp carpet to a song from 1989 and he's taking it so seriously. his concentration bent on getting the rhythm right, his head bowed slightly so the headphones don't slip and so he can keep his face close to your hair. you laugh again and again, burying your face in his chest, your shoulders shaking.

you can feel his confused happiness vibrating through his sternum.

"am i doing it wrong?" he asks. too loud because he's wearing the headphones, he can't tell how loud he is, and that just makes you laugh harder.

"no, baby." you tilt your face up. he's looking down at you with bobby's blue eyes and the headphones slightly askew from the angle of his head and something so soft underneath his expression you could kiss him. "you're doing it perfectly."

his expression softens. that pleased-feline look he gets when you call him baby. the proud one. the i'm being good for you and you noticed one. he resumes the swaying. spins you, experimentally, watching to see if you laugh again. you do. you laugh and stumble back into him and he catches you with such carefulness, cradling you closer.

you teach him to dip you. badly.

he overcorrects the first time and you nearly fall and bb makes a sound that is almost a laugh (bb laughing, actually laughing, a small involuntary sound he's never made before) and you stare at him and he stares back like he's just as surprised about it as you are. the headphones slip slightly. he doesn't fix them. you reach up and adjust them for him, settle them back into place, and his eyes close for a second when your fingers brush his temples.

you teach him to spin you. he picks it up instantly. he's gentle about it, careful with his strength.

at some point you sway too close and your forehead bumps against the side of the headphones and he hears you laugh (actually hears it, the laugh going directly into the headphone foam, mingling with the music) and his whole face lights up. like he just discovered a sound that didn't exist before this moment. he tilts his head deliberately, after that. presses one side of the headphones closer to your mouth. wants more of it. wants the music and you in the same channel.

so you sing.

quietly. badly. against the foam of the headphone he's angled toward you. the lyrics you know by heart, breathed into the small space where the music is leaking out, and bb goes absolutely still in a way that isn't predator-still or even bb-still but something new. like reverence. like he's standing inside something sacred.

his hand on your waist tightens.

"keep going," he says quietly against your hair.

so you do.

you dance until the tape finally clicks over (side B is shorter, you know that too) and then it plays through and ends and the walkman whirs softly but you both keep swaying. to nothing. to the hum of the backrooms. to the rhythm of his impossible non-heartbeat under your ear. the headphones still on his head, silent now, but he doesn't take them off. he doesn't want to take them off. they're proof. they're evidence. they're the crown you put on him and he intends to wear it for as long as you'll let him.

he doesn't want to stop. you can feel it. every time you slow he gently pulls you back into the rhythm. just a little longer. just one more silent song. just one more minute of you laughing against his chest and his hand at your waist and the smile on your face that he knows is for him.

laughter. smiling. touching. all of his favourite you things at once.

he's going to think about this for a while. you can already tell.

every time he goes silent and his eyes go a little distant, you'll know he's replaying it. cataloguing the way you felt against him. the exact sound of your laugh when he dipped you wrong. the weight of your hand in his. the muffled sound of your voice singing into the side of a headphone. he's adding it to whatever he has instead of a heart and turning it over like a smooth stone.

and you know that the next time you reach for the walkman he will be there before the tape finishes rewinding. head bowed. ready for the crown.

he learned. he always learns.

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

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

He blinks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Why do you think I chose this face?”

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

You're silent.

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

“I heard you,” he says quietly.

Your breath catches.

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

The lights flicker. Once. Settle again.

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

Your chest goes tight.

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

Your eyes burn, blurring his familiar features. 

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

“Stop,” you whisper.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s then you start crying.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“—if I'd been less”—”

“No.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Then you reach out and touch his face.

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

Better Bobby goes still.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Yes.”

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

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

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

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

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

You blink. “Something like that.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then it returns. 

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

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

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

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

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

You take his hand, and he pulls you up.

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

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

Then the hallway opens.

You stop.

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

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

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

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

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

“How—”

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

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

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

You grab his hand.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Your grip on his hand loosens. Slightly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“This is different.”

“Why?”

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

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

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

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

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

He goes still.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You lean your head against his shoulder lightly.

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

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

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

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

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

“I was lonely too,” he admits.

Your heart squeezes, quick and helpless.

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

It's peace.

The walk back is different.

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

And you're talking.

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

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

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

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

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

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

“Accept help?”

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

BB snorts. “Same thing.” 

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

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

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

“Shut up.”

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

“Can you even get a tattoo?”

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

He stops.

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

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

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

“BB, what—”

He moves.

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

“Please talk to me—”

“Shh.”

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

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

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

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

“What's happening? What's—”

“Stay.”

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

You blink, and he's gone.

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

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

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

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

You wait.

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

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

You wait.

BB comes back eventually.

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

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

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

Something's off.

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

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

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

“BB.”

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

“Hey, baby.”

“What happened?”

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

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

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

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

You stare. “An… entity?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instead, slowly, he nods.

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

“Okay.”

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

“Okay. Deal.”

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

Time passes.

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

You miss the real world.

It hits you at strange moments. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You think about going back.

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

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

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

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

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

Bobby is probably relieved.

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

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

Your presence in every corner asking to be noticed. 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And you start mapping instead.

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

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

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

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

One day.

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

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

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

BB watches you work with undisguised fascination.

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

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

Half the time you forget he's not human.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“It helps me think.”

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

“Is that a problem?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

BB takes you exploring.

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

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

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

But most days, BB takes you out.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The guilt is instantaneous.

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

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

You go quiet. BB notices. 

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

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

You grow comfortable.

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

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

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

You stop keeping count.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A way to survive.

“It's circling again.”

You look up sharply. 

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

You set the pen down. “How close?”

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

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

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

“Yes,” he agrees. “Like that.”

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

“What are you going to do?”

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

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

His mouth parts. 

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

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

“I know the rules.”

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

“You better be.”

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

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

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

He rounds the corner, and the yellow swallows him.

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

You underline unknown twice.

Eleven minutes.

You know this because you've been counting. 

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

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

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

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

You close the notebook slowly.

Six figures come around the corner.

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

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

They waited for BB to leave.

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

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

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

“Ma'am, that's not—”

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

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

He reaches for your arm.

You hit him.

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

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

Then three of them are on you.

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

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

“Fucking—hold her, HOLD HER—”

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

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

“You want to do this the hard way?”

You spit at him. It catches his vest.

He hits you.

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

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

“Stay DOWN—”

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

You open your mouth. You fill your lungs.

And you scream.

“BB—”

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

The fluorescent lights don't flicker. They detonate.

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

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

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

The boot lifts off your back.

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

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

He comes out of the dark.

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

He’s not fully human-shaped.

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

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

He sees you on the ground.

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

BB sees the boot print on your back.

There’s a sound.

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

The remaining fluorescent tube doesn't shatter. 

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

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

It takes less than a minute.

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

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

Then there's nothing.

Silence.

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

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

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

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

You turn over.

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

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

You reach for him.

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

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

You pull yourself into him, and you cling. 

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

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

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

You don't care.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“You don't have to.”

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

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

“A little.”

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

“I should have been here.”

“You came.”

“Not fast enough.”

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

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

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

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

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

“Yeah?” Immediate. Soft.

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

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

“Never,” he whispers.

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

You close your eyes.

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

He will do this forever if you let him.

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

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

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

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

You let him.

M.E.G. INTERNAL — MAJOR EXPLORER GROUP

DEPARTMENT OF ENTITY RESEARCH & CONTAINMENT

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

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

SUMMARY OF INCIDENT

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

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

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

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

The Agency disregarded this recommendation.

All six members of the tactical unit are dead.

RECONSTRUCTION OF EVENTS

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

██:██ — The Companion screams.

██:██ — Entity 0 arrives.

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

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

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

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

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

Level ███ is gone.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The engagement lasted approximately 42 seconds.

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

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

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

ASSESSMENT OF CONSEQUENCES

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

FORMAL OBJECTIONS

I want the following on the record:

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

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

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

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

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

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

RECOMMENDATIONS

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

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

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

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

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

Filed: ██/██/199█

Operations Director ██████

Addendum, handwritten:

She screamed his name, and the level cracked open.

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

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

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

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

God help us all.

“Hello? Are you deaf, or just exceptionally rude?” you snapped, your temper beginning to fray under the strain of exhaustion. “You can’t just abduct a civilian and give them the silent treatment. It’s bad form. It’s a terrible narrative arc. Frankly, if this were a manuscript, I’d reject it on page three for having an uncommunicative, one-dimensional protagonist.”

He took a sharp left turn down another alley, the chain zipping out and yanking your arm so hard your shoulder popped. You let out a very unladylike curse.

“Keep your voice down,” he grunted, his voice a low, gravelly vibration that barely carried over the sound of the rain. “And stop talking.”

“I will not stop talking! I am chained to a psychopath in a bespoke suit who just punched a man's teeth down his throat,” you fired back, hiking up your soaked coat to keep it out of the mud. “And calling you 'Mysterious Moustache Man' in my head is getting exhausting. It’s entirely too many syllables. 'Mys-te-ri-ous Mous-tache Man'. See? Seven syllables. It’s inefficient. What the fuck is your name?”

He stopped so suddenly that the chain retracted violently, slamming you directly into his back. You bounced off the solid wall of muscle and bone, clutching your nose.

He turned around slowly, towering over you in the gloom of the alleyway. The sparse light from a distant streetlamp caught the hard, flat angles of his face. He looked like murder incarnate. The thick chevron moustache over his upper lip, which you had to admit, was objectively magnificent, twitched slightly, the only sign that your constant yapping was grinding away at his iron-clad patience.

“You are a liability!” he said, the words heavy and cold. “You are an accident that got tangled in my operation. If you do not shut your mouth, I will gag you with your own scarf. Do you understand me?”

You glared up at him, wiping rain from your eyes, your heart pounding a frantic rhythm against your ribs. You were terrified, yes, but the sheer absurdity of the threat sparked something deeply stubborn inside you.

“It’s a cashmere blend, so I’d really prefer you didn't.” you shot back, refusing to look away from those cold, dead eyes. “And honestly, you shouldn't be so sensitive. I wasn't insulting the moustache. It’s actually very impressive. It gives you a whole 1970s authoritarian, 'I could crush a skull with my bare hands' vibe. It works for you. But I still need a name. If I’m going to die in a damp alleyway, I’d like to know who to haunt.”

He stared at you. For a second, you genuinely thought he might hit you. His massive chest rose and fell with a slow, controlled breath, as if he were actively restraining the urge to throw you into a dumpster.

“Walker.” he finally growled, the single word dripping with absolute disdain. “August Walker.”

“August. Great. See, was that so fucking hard, August?” you huffed, shaking your wet hair out of your face.

Walker just turned and started walking again, his stride even faster this time, forcing you into a clumsy, agonizing jog.

For three more blocks, you tried to keep up. But human anatomy, specifically the anatomy forced into four-inch Christian Louboutin stiletto pumps, has its limits. The pain in your calves had gone from a dull ache to a sharp, stabbing fire, and your toes were completely numb.

With a defiant, frustrated cry, you threw your weight backward and slammed your feet onto the wet pavement, locking your knees.

The magnetic chain hissed out from Walker’s cuff. Three feet. Four feet. Till it hit the limit.

Walker was yanked backward. With his massive momentum, it was like a mastiff reaching the end of a leash. He stumbled half a step, let out a visceral, guttural snarl of pure rage, and whipped around.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Walker roared, stepping toward you, his massive frame closing the distance in a second. He grabbed the chain, his fist hovering inches from your face. “Move!”

“I can't!” you yelled back, pointing a shaking, rain-slicked finger down at your feet. “I physically cannot take another step in these! My feet are bleeding, Walker! I am literally walking on bloody stumps!”

Walker looked down at the sleek, pointed-toe heels. His expression was one of total, unadulterated disgust. “Then take them off and leave them. You don't need shoes to run.”

You gasped, genuinely offended, clutching your chest with your free hand. “Leave them? In a puddle? Are you out of your goddamn mind?”

“They are shoes!” Walker spat, his voice dropping into that terrifying, lethal register again. “Take them off, or I will break your ankles and drag you the rest of the way.”

“They are not just shoes, you uncultured, muscle-bound brute!” you screamed, your voice echoing off the brick walls. “These are Louboutins! Do you know how much these cost? They are a thousand-pound investment! I saved up for six months to buy these to celebrate my promotion! I am not abandoning them in a Soho gutter just because you’re having a bad day at the spy office!”

Walker looked at you as if you had just spoken to him in an alien dialect. He looked at the shoes, then back at your face, trying to compute the logic of a woman who was handcuffed to a CIA operative, fleeing heavily armed hostiles, and refusing to abandon a piece of footwear.

“You are insane.” he stated flatly.

“I am fiscally responsible!” you countered. With an angry groan, you reached down, fighting the tension of the cuff, and ripped the heels off your feet. You snatched them up by the straps, clutching the expensive leather to your chest like a newborn child.

You stood up, your stockinged feet sinking into a puddle of freezing, murky water. You shivered violently, the cold biting straight through to your bones, but you lifted your chin in defiance. “Fine. Let's go. But if I step on a syringe, I’m suing the CIA, or MI6, or whatever shadow organization pays for your custom-tailored suits.”

Walker let out a long, slow exhale through his nose, his eyes closed for a brief second as he prayed for the strength not to kill you. “Just... walk,” he muttered.

You began to walk, barefoot on the wet, unforgiving asphalt of London. It was miserable. Every pebble felt like a shard of glass, and the cold was seeping up your legs, making your teeth chatter. But you had your shoes.

Ten minutes later, the adrenaline crash hit you like a physical wall. The sheer terror of the gun to your head, the sprint through the rain, and the freezing cold combined into a hollow, gnawing ache in your gut. Your stomach let out a loud, drawn-out rumble that sounded like a dying whale.

Walker didn't even look back. “Keep your bodily functions to yourself.”

“I'm starving!” you announced, shivering violently now. “I need food. I need carbs. I haven't eaten anything since a sad desk salad at one o'clock, it didn’t even had cheese. If my blood sugar drops any lower, I’m going to pass out, and then you will have to drag me.”

Walker ignored you, his sharp eyes scanning the street as you finally emerged from the alleyway onto a slightly wider, dimly lit residential road. Cars were parked bumper-to-bumper along the curb.

“I'm serious, August. I will bite you.” you threatened, hobbling on the pavement.

Walker stopped abruptly beside an older, slightly battered black sedan. He glanced around the empty street, checking the windows of the flats above them. He pulled his right arm, bringing you close to the driver's side door, his eyes locked on the lock mechanism.

“We need a vehicle…” he muttered, reaching into his pocket with his left hand and pulling out a small, metallic device. He shoved it into the keyhole of the car door and forced it. A soft click echoed, and the door swung open.

“You're stealing a car?” you asked, leaning in close, temporarily distracted from your hunger. “That's illegal.”

Walker paused, slowly turning his head to look at you, his face a mask of absolute, withering disbelief. “I just broke a man’s jaw and shot up an alleyway. Do you think I give a shit about grand theft auto?”

“Fair point.” you conceded, clutching your shoes tighter.

Walker threw himself into the driver's seat, dragging you in after him. Because of the handcuffs, you were forced awkwardly into the passenger seat, the center console digging into your hip. Walker immediately reached under the steering column, his large hands working with brutal efficiency to rip the plastic paneling away. Wires tumbled out into his lap.

He looked at the wires, then looked over at you. His eyes were hard and calculating.

“I need both hands to hotwire this quickly, and I need to be ready to return fire if the Syndicate catches up.” Walker said, his voice clipped and serious. He gestured to the steering wheel. “Can you drive?”

You sat back in the passenger seat, your wet hair plastered to your face, your expensive shoes resting on your lap, and your stockinged feet covered in London grime. You looked at the steering wheel, then looked back at the giant, terrifying assassin who currently held your life in his very large, very capable hands.

You lifted your chin, a small, thoroughly inappropriate smile crossing your lips.

“Absolutely not.” you said proudly. “I’ve lived in London my whole life. I use the Tube.”

August froze. The wires slipped from his fingers. He slowly, deliberately turned his head to face you.

The glare he leveled at you wasn't just angry, it was apocalyptic. It was the look of a man who had faced warlords, terrorists, and global catastrophes, only to be utterly defeated by a sarcastic book editor who didn't possess a driver's license. The heavy silence in the stolen sedan stretched out, broken only by the steady drumming of the rain against the windshield and the soft, maddening hum of the magnetic handcuffs linking you together.

The silence inside the stolen sedan was absolute, heavy, and suffocating. Outside, the London rain continued to batter the roof, a relentless, drumming assault that matched the frantic, panicked rhythm of your heart. Inside, however, the air was completely stagnant.

August Walker had not moved a single muscle since you proudly declared your inability to operate a motor vehicle. He was frozen, his massive hands hovering over the exposed, tangled wires of the steering column. The dashboard lights cast a sickly, pale green glow across his face, highlighting the sharp, rigid angles of his jaw and the terrifying blankness in his eyes. He looked like a statue carved from pure, unadulterated rage.

You, on the other hand, were painfully, violently alive.

The adrenaline crash had fully set in, leaving you hollowed out, trembling, and hyper-aware of every miserable sensation in your body. Your trench coat was completely soaked through, clinging to your arms like a freezing second skin. Your bare feet, resting awkwardly on the floor mat, were covered in grit and icy puddle water. But the absolute worst part was your stockings.

The sheer, expensive nylons were torn at the knees, caked in mud, and plastered to your legs in a way that felt deeply, horribly violating. They were cold, they were wet, and they were driving you absolutely insane.

With a frustrated, exhausted sigh, you shifted in the cramped passenger seat. You couldn't take it anymore. The man chained to you might be having a terrifying internal aneurysm, but you were going to be comfortable while he did it.

You reached down with your free right hand, your fingers clumsy with the cold, and dug under the hem of your wet skirt.

His eyes finally snapped over to you, breaking his catatonic stare.

You ignored him. You hooked your fingers into the waistband of the ruined stockings and began to peel them down. It was an incredibly awkward maneuver, given that your left wrist was securely handcuffed to the right wrist of a giant, homicidal CIA operative. The high-tech, magnetic chain hummed softly as you tugged, stretching across the center console. You had to contort your hips, lifting your freezing feet one at a time, wrestling the wet, clinging nylon down your calves and over your ankles.

Finally, with a wet, squelching sound, you pulled the ruined fabric completely off. You held the balled-up, muddy mess of nylon between your fingers, letting out a violent, full-body shudder of pure disgust.

Without a second thought, you leaned over, pushed the passenger side door open a few inches with your shoulder, and aggressively chucked the ruined stockings out into the rainy street. They landed with a pathetic splat in a puddle. You pulled the door shut, wiping your hands on your wet coat, feeling a microscopic fraction of dignity return to you.

When you sat back up, August was staring at you.

He wasn't just looking; he was glaring. It was a look of such profound, withering judgment that it actually made you pause. His dark eyes tracked from the door you had just closed, down to your bare, freezing legs, and finally up to your face. The thick chevron mustache twitched above his upper lip, a subtle indicator of the monumental irritation boiling beneath his stoic exterior.

“What?” you demanded, your voice defensive and sharp. “They were wet and disgusting. I felt like I was wearing a swamp. Sue me for wanting basic bodily comfort while being held hostage!”

August didn’t blink. His chest expanded with a slow, deep breath, stretching the fabric of his damp, tailored suit.

“How old are you?” he asked. His voice was low, flat, and completely devoid of inflection. It wasn't a casual question; it sounded like an interrogation tactic.

You blinked, utterly taken aback. Of all the things you expected him to say, a threat, an insult, a command to get out of the car, this was the absolute last.

“How dare you!” you gasped dramatically, a hand flying to your chest. The sheer audacity of the man cut right through your exhaustion. “You abduct me, you drag me through the mud, you chain me to your wrist like a goddamn dog, and now you have the nerve to ask a woman her age? What is wrong with you? Did they skip basic social etiquette at spy school?”

Walker’s patience, already hanging by a microscopic thread, violently snapped.

With a sudden, aggressive movement that made you flinch, he reached entirely across the center console. You let out a startled yelp, shrinking back against the passenger door, thinking he was finally going to hit you. But his massive hand bypassed your body entirely, his thick fingers grabbing the leather strap of your open tote bag resting by your left hip.

“Hey! Get your hands off that!” you shouted, your protective instincts flaring. “That is private property!”

“Shut the fuck up!” Walker growled, his voice vibrating with lethal authority.

He yanked the bag toward him. Because your left hand was cuffed to his right, the movement yanked the magnetic chain taut, violently jerking your arm across the console and pulling you halfway out of your seat. You hissed in pain as the cuff bit into your skin, but Walker completely ignored your discomfort. He held the bag with his left hand and used his cuffed right hand to ruthlessly dig through your belongings, shoving aside waterlogged manuscripts, a crushed salad container, and a half-empty tube of expensive hand cream.

“Stop it! You pompous prick, give me my bag!” You grabbed his massive forearm with your free hand, digging your nails into his wet suit sleeve, trying to pry him away. It was like trying to wrestle a concrete pillar.

His fingers closed around your small leather wallet. He pulled it out, flipped it open with his thumb, and immediately pulled out your ID card. He dropped your bag onto the floorboard, letting the chain retract slightly so you could sit back, though you were breathing heavily with pure outrage.

He held the small plastic card up to the green glow of the dashboard lights. His eyes scanned the text, narrowing slightly.

“Thirty-five…” August read aloud, his tone flat, dropping the card into his lap. He turned his head slowly to look at you, his expression one of complete, baffled disgust. “You are thirty-five years old.”

“And thriving, thank you very much!” you snapped, crossing your arms, well, crossing one arm and laying the cuffed one awkwardly across your stomach. “What the hell does my age have to do with anything?”

“You are thirty-five years old...” Walker repeated, his voice rising a fraction of a decibel, “and you do not know how to operate a motor vehicle.”

“It's London!” you practically shrieked, throwing your free hand in the air. “The Tube is incredibly efficient! Driving in this city is an absolute environmental and logistical nightmare, the traffic is medieval, and parking costs more than my monthly rent! Why the fuck would I own a car? I take the Jubilee line like a normal, civilized human being!”

“Civilized?” Walker scoffed, a dark, ugly sound. “You are thirty-five, completely helpless, and a massive liability. If you could drive, I could hotwire this ignition in sixty seconds while you prepped the vehicle. Now, I have to do both, one-handed, while watching for the heavily armed hostiles who are currently hunting us.”

“Well, I am so sorry my lack of driving skills is inconveniencing your highly illegal international shootout!” you fired back, your temper completely exploding. “Maybe if you hadn't let some twitchy lunatic handcuff us together, you wouldn't be in this situation! You’re supposed to be this giant, badass agent, and you got outplayed by a guy in a dirty tracksuit!”

Walker’s jaw clenched so hard you heard his teeth grind. “I will literally break your neck and leave you in this seat.”

“Do it! I dare you!” you yelled, completely losing your mind to the stress. “At least I wouldn't be hungry anymore!”

You violently turned around in your seat, turning your back to him to face the passenger window. As you did, you aggressively yanked your left arm, pulling his cuffed right hand hard against the center console.

“Ow! Dammit!” you muttered as the cuff pinched, but you refused to turn back around. “You are incredibly rude, you are totally unhinged, and I am done with this! Take me home. Right now. I want to go to my flat, I want to take a hot shower, and I want to forget I ever met your stupid, moustachioed face.”

The silence returned to the car, thick and volatile. You stared out the rain-streaked window, your chest heaving, waiting for him to retaliate, to hit you, to yell.

Instead, there was just the sound of a heavy, exhausted exhale.

“I can't take you home!” Walker said, his voice stripped of its anger, leaving only a cold, blunt reality. “The men I am hunting saw you. They saw my face, they saw yours. By now, they’ve run your biometrics from street cameras. If you go back to your flat, you will be dead before morning.”

Your breath hitched. The anger evaporated, replaced by a sudden, freezing spike of pure terror. You slowly turned your head to look over your shoulder at him.

Walker wasn't glaring anymore. He was just looking at you, his face a grim mask of absolute certainty. He reached down, grabbed your wallet, and tossed it into your lap.

“We are abandoning the vehicle,” Walker stated, his tone shifting back to tactical efficiency. “Without two hands, it takes too long. We are exposed here. We need to move to a secure location where I can sever this chain.”

“Move where?” your voice was small, the fight completely drained out of you. “I can't walk anymore, August. I really can't. And I'm so hungry my hands are shaking. If I don't eat something, I am going to faint. And then you are going to have one hundred and forty pounds of dead weight attached to your wrist.”

Walker stared at you for a long, calculating moment. He looked at your shaking hands, your pale face, and the desperate, exhausted set of your jaw. He let out a low grunt that sounded remarkably like a curse.

“Fine,” he snapped, shoving the car door open. “Get out.”

Fifteen minutes later, the chaotic, terrifying reality of your life had been reduced to the greasy confines of a dimly lit, profoundly depressing pub on the edge of Soho. The establishment smelled strongly of stale ale, bleach, and decades of bad decisions. The few patrons scattered in the booths looked like they wouldn't blink if a murder happened on the sticky wooden floor, which made it the perfect place to hide.

You were sitting in a dark corner booth, shoved tight against the wall. And for the first time in what felt like an eternity, you were quiet.

You had a massive, greasy double cheeseburger in your right hand, and you were eating it with a feral, unapologetic intensity. Grease dripped down your chin, and you didn't care. The hot, salty rush of calories was hitting your system like a drug, pulling you back from the edge of passing out.

Across the small, sticky table sat August Walker.

He was not eating. He was not drinking. He was sitting completely rigid, his massive shoulders taking up the entire width of the booth, his eyes sweeping the pub with predatory, unblinking focus. His left hand rested flat on the table, near the heavy lump in his jacket where you knew his gun was hidden. His right hand was extended across the table, tethered to your left wrist by the shimmering, high-tech magnetic chain.

You took another massive bite of the burger, moaning softly at the taste of the sharp cheddar and charred beef. You reached out with your right hand, grabbed a handful of soggy, oil-soaked chips, and shoved them into your mouth.

Walker’s eyes snapped from the front door to you. He watched you eat, his expression a mixture of profound disgust and reluctant acceptance.

“Are you finished inhaling that?” Walker asked, his voice a low, gravelly rumble across the table.

You chewed methodically, swallowing the massive bite before looking at him. The food had worked a miracle. Your blood sugar had stabilized, the shaking had stopped, and your usual, sassy demeanor was slowly filtering back in. Now that you weren't actively fearing for your immediate life in an alleyway, you were feeling incredibly cooperative. Well, just a little.

“Not quite,” you said, licking a smear of ketchup off your thumb. “It’s actually fucking fantastic. You really should have ordered one. It might help with your deeply ingrained hostility issues.”

August narrowed his eyes, the heavy moustache lowering as his jaw set. “My hostility issues are currently keeping you breathing, darling.”

“Fair point.” you conceded, taking a sip from a pint of lukewarm water the heavily tattooed bartender had slammed down earlier. You tapped the metallic cuff on your left wrist with your index finger. It made a sharp clink against the wood. “So, what's the play, Walker? I'm fed, I'm resting my bare, battered feet, and I have accepted that I am temporarily a fugitive from justice. You said we needed a secure location to cut this thing off. Does this pub have a secret underground spy lair, or are we just waiting for someone to come shoot us?”

August leaned forward slightly, the chain slacking between you. His dark eyes locked onto yours, completely devoid of any humor.

“We are waiting for my extraction team to verify a clean route...” he said softly, the gravel in his voice scraping against the ambient noise of the pub. “And once they do, you are going to stand up, you are going to keep your mouth shut, and you are going to follow my exact orders. If you don't, I won't just leave you behind. I will make sure you can't be followed.”

You stopped chewing. The threat was explicit, and entirely serious. You looked at the hulking, dangerous man you were chained to, realizing that the burger hadn't changed the reality of the situation.

You swallowed hard, placing the remaining half of your burger down on the paper wrapper. You wiped your mouth with a cheap napkin, your eyes holding his unwavering stare.

“Understood,” you said quietly. “Just... tell me when to move.”

August gave a single, curt nod, leaning back into the shadows of the booth, his eyes returning to the pub's entrance. The chain between you hummed softly, a constant, binding reminder that your night was far from over.

Then you yawned and he glared.

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The man pierced with Dunk’s iron says his mother’s name. It comes out thin and astonished, as though he had expected to die louder. Duncan hears it over the din. He watches the man’s eyes go queer in his face—film creeping over them, the pupils dulling, the whole wet look turning flat, the way dead fish do when they rise in poisoned water and the sun gets at their bellies.

An apology pushes up hard against Duncan’s teeth. He keeps it there. There is something mean in begging pardon of a man you have already run through. It makes him answer for your sorrow besides his own death. When the body sags and quits at last, Duncan braces a hand to the fellow’s shoulder, eases him off the blade, and lowers him onto his back with what care he can manage in a field full of screaming men. Then he pulls his sword free and breathes.

The stream is only a little way off. Sun has had all morning to work on his armour. The plates burn through his surcoat. The mail at his throat rubs raw and holds the heat there. Under it, the blood trapped in the quilted cloth has already begun to turn.

He knows he ought to go back. He knows the work is not done. His knees strike the bank before the thought is finished. He drags off one glove and then the other, drops them in the grass, and thrusts both hands into the current so fast the cold hurts. Water ropes round his fingers and under his nails and takes the blood by threads at first, then by clouds, until the stream runs pink, then weak as watered wine, then clear again as though the thing had never happened anywhere but inside his own skull.

He bows his head over it. His breath goes in rough through the nose and leaves slower. For a moment he can do nothing but look at his hands—broad things, nicked over the knuckles. Then he cups water to his face. The shock of it lifts the worst of the heat. He does it again. Lets it run from his brow and nose and mouth. Somewhere behind him men are still shouting. Steel still rings out, thin with distance now.

Duncan shuts his eyes. He has never been much for prayer, nor for finding the right words for it, but there are not many disbelievers in a foxhole. He opens his mouth.

“Mother, take him. He called your name. Forgive me for it. Mind his mother, too.” Breath shudders out of him. “Warrior, make me brave enough. Keep my hand true.”

Beyond the bank where the water deepens and the weeds grow long as hair, something has gone perfectly still to watch him.

When you see him kill your heart flutters strangely. Clean slice, straight for the heart. Merciful and cold in the same breath.

You know violence as the sharp white turn of a fish’s belly before your teeth close round it. The panic-kick of things that fit in your hands and things that do not, the times your own blood has gone stringing loose in the water because something bigger thought to make a meal of you first. Death below the surface is ugly, but it serves. Something eats. Something lives another day. Here, men spill one another open for reasons that do not end in hunger. The body falls in the grass and feeds no one. The waste of it catches at your mind.

Yet the great one uses his strength well. Joyless, he puts the blade where it must go and gets it done. Warrior, your thoughts supply at once, though he is younger than the word makes him sound.

Then, he stays. Only for a breath long enough to ease the dead man down from his sword and keep him from crumpling into the dirt like a sack split at the seams, but it is enough to draw you closer under the current. Almost as if he cannot bear for the man to go wholly alone. Almost as if being the hand that kills makes him answerable for that last small stretch between breath and none.

You slip nearer the bank, slow as weed-drift, and brace your fingers between the stones. The stream is clear here. It lets you see him drop to his knees. Lets you see him strip off his gloves with hands gone clumsy from heat. Blood clouds into the water when he thrusts his fingers in. He bends and sluices his face.

Your tail gives a hard, involuntary twitch. Until now he has been iron and leather and bright mail and the broad set of shoulders that belong to grown creatures who know their force. Then the water takes the blood and the grime from him and what rises from beneath it stills your breath clean out of you.

A boy. A beautiful boy. Young in the face despite the size of him. Wet lashes spiked dark. Mouth parted. Water running from brow to cheek to jaw, then slipping under the collar at his throat and down his neck. Your nails bite into the stones. Your gills flare wide and fast. You drag in more water through them without meaning to, as if the stream has suddenly thinned and left you short.

He opens his mouth and your eyes shut. The shouting from the field dulls. Stream keeps on at your shoulders. Wind moves somewhere high in the crowns of the trees. All of it goes faint around the shape of his voice. It reaches you blurred by distance, scant and earnest, with none of the grand sound men use when they want the world to think them holy. He asks for the dead man first. For the mother of the dead man. Forgiveness for what his own hand has done. Then he asks for bravery enough to return and do more of other men’s bidding before the sun goes down.

Nothing for himself. No glory. No protection. No rich spoil. Not even life.

Your grip slips and tightens again. Something deep in you, old as tide-pull, gives way. You have seen handsome things before. Fast things. Dangerous things. You have wanted and hunted and fed.

This is worse. This is a hurt that blooms sweet through the middle of you. By the time he lowers his head and the last of his prayer leaves his mouth and goes nowhere you can see, you love him so completely it feels less like being struck and more like sinking.

He rises and leaves, and the place he was at is empty as if it were bitten. The bank looks wrong without him on it. The water goes on over the stones as though nothing has happened. Your heart has no such manners. It follows him at once, crude and greedy, as though wanting were a hand with fingers on it. You part your lips with half a mind to call after him. Men can be called. Men can be coaxed to the water with the right note laid soft over the surface. You know how to turn the voice sweet enough to draw a neck forward, a foot wrong, a whole body into your keeping. The sound gathers under your tongue and dies there. To put a spell on him feels foul. It seems to you that a creature like that ought to come of his own will, or not at all.

You do not know by what rules men choose their maidens. You know only the old shapes from song and tale, the women with hair to their waists and wreaths at their throats, the ones led from halls by the hand, kissed before witnesses, warmed by fires built on dry land. Even the plainest of them has what you have not.

Legs.

By the time the sun tilts lower you are stern in the mind and weak in the heart, which is a poor way to go to a witch and the only way you have.

You gather what seems dear. Round pebbles from the streambed, the ones worn smooth as eggs. A white one with a milk-pale seam through the middle. A twist of yarrow and sage stolen from the bank where the roots drink deep. A handful of hazelnuts, though you have never eaten one and do not know if witches do. Three rowan berries bright as pinpricks of blood. One swan feather gone loose among the rushes.

Childish things, perhaps. Bride-things from the mind of a fool. You keep them all the same, tucked close in the fold of weed and river-grass you knot for carrying. Then you force yourself into one of the narrow runs that leaves the stream and threads the dark places inland. Mud slicks your sides. Roots comb your hair. The water grows warm and still and brown. It narrows to veins and then opens without warning into the bog pool, black at the middle, with a hut crouched on the shore as if it had grown there meanly from the peat.

You wait a long while with only your eyes above the weed. Nothing stirs but a gnat-cloud and the slow shake of sedge in the wind. At last you take one of the little stones from your hoard and throw it. It clicks against the wooden door. The sound is small; it still seems to carry everywhere. You sink lower, heart drumming hard, and hide among the pondweed with the offerings clutched to your breast, as if the right gifts and a brave face might yet make you into something a beautiful boy could love.

The door opens. The woman who steps out is bent nowhere and old everywhere. Her hair hangs in ropes the colour of drowned straw. Her shift is the grey of mushroom flesh. She peers toward the water as if she has smelt you already.

“Well,” she says. “What pretty thing noses at my threshold?”

You rise through the skin of water and push the bundle of gifts towards her. “I brought—”

“Did you.” She stoops and takes it between two fingers, as if it is something small and dead. “Then speak. A wish is no good to me till it has a mouth.”

You blink at her. Try to find the words for something prettier than a blunt girly whim, but they come out as they are. “I want legs.”

The witch looks at you for a moment. Then, she laughs. “That is not what you want.”

Mud stirs under your tail with the force of your annoyance. You dig the tip of it down into the black silt.

“Ah,” she coos, seeing it. “There is no shame in wanting, child. Only folly in pretending. You want a lad to love you.” You remain silent long enough for her eyes narrow with delight. “No. Not a lad.” She leans closer over the bank, and her smile turns terrible with it. “A knight.”

The scales along the back of your tail prickle. “Can you help me?”

“Likely.” She reaches down without warning, crooks one finger beneath your chin, and turns your face first one way, then the other. “You are fair enough for mortal work. Fairer than many that walk on two feet and think well of themselves besides. Why not sing to him? Why not call him into the water? Earth has given you gifts enough. Why do you not use them?”

You pull away from her hand. “I do not wish to lure him.”

Her mouth rounds. “Oh.” The sound is soft, but curdles your stomach all the same. “It is true love, then,” she says. “Pure as springwater. You would not stain your dear knight with a spell.” Her voice thins to a hiss. “What do you think you are doing here, if not spell-work?”

“The spell is not for him,” you say, and hear the weakness in it. “It is for me. I only need legs.”

“A spell is a spell all the same.”

She turns your bundle and lets the things fall. The pebbles, the berries, the herbs, the feather—all of it drops into the bog with a series of small, insulting plops. One hazelnut floats a moment before the water takes it.

“You may keep your trinkets,” she says. “I am not a hedge-wife to be bought with rowan and sage.”

Heat rises through you against the coldness of the bog. “Then why hear me?”

“Because I am curious.” She smiles again. “And because I can give you what you want. Under a condition,” she says.

Of course. Again, you keep still and say nothing. She seems to like that better than if you had begged.

“I will give you legs, and all that comes with them. You will wake with feet to stand on and knees to bend. You will go where he goes if you can keep pace. You will have three nights to win what you came for.”

The reeds whisper in the wind. Somewhere behind her hut a bird cries once and stops.

“If by the third night the knight loves you, the bargain is spent. If not, a soul is owed me.”

Your fingers tighten on the mud-bank. “Mine?”

“If you are dull enough.” The witch reaches into the fold of her garment and brings out a dagger. It is old and grisly, with a hilt of dark wood worn smooth by long handling. The blade is dark as well, but moonlight catches on it in a thin wet line. It looks hungry. “Or his.”

You stare at it.

“He may be given in your stead,” she says mildly. “A thrust under the rib. Upward, if you are weak in the arm. Bring him to me warm and I shall count us square.”

“Why would I do that?”

She lifts one shoulder. “Because hearts turn vicious when they do not get their fill. Because death is easier than longing for some creatures. Because on the third night you may find you love yourself a little more than him. I make room for all outcomes.”

The dagger gleams in her hand. You cannot stop looking at it. At last you whisper, “How shall I know if he loves me?”

The witch’s brows rise. “Were you not certain of it a moment ago?”

A pout blooms on your face unbidden.

She crouches at the bank then, bringing her face close to yours. Her breath smells of peat and old roots.

“When mortal men love their maidens,” she says, almost kindly, “they do not keep their hands to themselves. They part those fine legs you hunger after. They open the flesh between and put themselves there.”

A cold shiver runs the length of you.

Her smile returns, pleased and wicked. “There. That is plain enough even for a love-addled little fish.” She straightens. “Well? Do you accept?”

The word catches in your mouth. You sweep the dagger, the dark bog, the hut with your eyes. Then, her face, which has no mercy in it and no patience either. Because you have already loved him enough to come here, you say, “Yes.”

“Of course you do.” She puts the dagger down on the bank within your reach, then slips her hand somewhere inside her sleeve, deeper than the cloth ought to allow. When she draws it out again there is an egg in her palm, black-speckled and oddly warm.

You frown at it.

“Eat.”

“What is it?”

“An egg,” she says. “Do not go witless on me now.”

You take it from her. The shell is warm indeed, almost hot. “And then?”

“Then you sleep. Then you wake altered. It need not trouble you beyond that.”

It turns in your hand. “Raw?”

The witch gives you a look of withering contempt. “No, child. Put it in a silver cup and take it with honey.” She bares her teeth. “Yes, raw.”

Your eyes lower, ashamed of the question. The shell cracks easily. The inside slides thick and strange over your tongue. You swallow twice to get it down. The witch watches every motion.

When it is done, you wipe your mouth with the back of your hand and say, “How shall I find him?”

At that, something shifts in her face. Too rotten to be kindness, but it is the brief look of someone hearing a tune they know well.

“His blood is in the water,” she says.

Then she steps back, pulls the door open, and goes inside. It shuts between one blink and the next, leaving you in the bog with the dagger on the bank and the taste of the egg still clinging at the back of your throat.

You swim the way you came slowly. Moonlight makes the water mean and every root below look like a hand with the shape of something waiting. Above, the moon itself has thinned to a sickle near fine enough to seem a cut laid across the sky. It tells you that on the night of your judgement it will be gone altogether. You will hear it in the dark. His blood is in the water, the witch had said, and the current takes you at her word, carrying you through the narrow runs and back toward the broader stream where you first saw him kneel.

By the time you reach it, the bank is empty. You keep to the deeper part and let yourself drift there, belly turned uneasy by the egg, heart sore with a want that has already learned absence.

Sleep comes badly. Even so, it comes. The river rocks you. In the first fold of dreaming he leans over the bank again, all shadow and wet lashes, and this time when he opens his mouth it is not prayer that leaves it but your name. He reaches for you with a careful hand and thumb wedging under your chin. He bends and kisses you as though he has been thinking on nothing else.

Then the dream turns. Above you, something vast opens. The eye of god, grey and pale and lidless, hanging in the dark where the moon had been. Its patience is so complete the age of it exceeds the feeling of pity. Below, a pair of shears glints, iron-black and long as oars. The water thickens around you into a fat-like jelly, holds you fiercely, as the blades close with a sound no louder than a crab-shell snapping, and fire races you clean through. 

Scale after scale dulls and loosens. Webbing parts. Bone groans as if gripped and wrung by unseen hands. Your tail splits where no living thing ought to split and your flesh draws apart. New joints wrench themselves into being with a wet internal crack that never seems to finish. You open your mouth to scream and swallow black water instead. Heat tears through you from spine to hip to the new-made lengths of you, all the way to ten small, useless ends where your body has never ended before. Hair roots burn. Teeth ache. Even your fingertips feel changed, as though the whole of you has been dragged through too narrow an opening and forced to come out other.

You wake choking while dawn creeps into the sky. Half on the bank, half in the wash of the stream, naked to the chill, with the dagger clutched to your breast. Air rasps into you thinly through mouth and nose, making panic strike at once. You paw at your ribs and find only smooth skin where your gills ought to flare. Sealed. Gone. You drag another breath and another, each one scant enough to frighten. The water at your side offers no help. It laps your hip stupidly, as if it does not know you.

When you look down, you see them. Legs.

Two of them, long and bare and wrong as peeled roots. Knees knuckled sharp. Feet splayed in the mud with their blunt little toes. They belong to you no more than the moon belongs to the bog. The sight turns your stomach. You put a hand to one thigh. The skin there is soft and strange, without scale or sheen or the strength of a tail built to drive through current. When you try to draw the limb in, the knee folds with a hideous ease and the whole thing jerks sideways. It feels loose. Breakable. Made badly.

Still, you have asked for them. You plant both palms in the earth and try to rise and pain bites through your middle. Your legs buckle, each seeming to choose a different direction. One foot slides out from under you. The other catches on nothing and twists. You go down hard on your hands, palms full of mud. For a while you can do nothing but crouch there trembling, hair hanging round your face, breath coming sharp and ugly through a body that no longer knows its own shape.

Morning hones itself as you kneel in it. The scent of his blood has thinned almost to nothing. In its place comes the rest: men everywhere, dead and living both. Sweat gone sour in gambesons. Split guts, horse piss, iron and smoke. The field beyond the trees breathes out ruin by the lungful.

You have three days. Three days to find the knight, make him love you, and keep your soul out of a witch’s hand. You cannot even stand. Water clouds your vision and you laugh bitterly at how it won’t let you go entirely.

On the morrow, Dunk sweeps through the edges of the battlefield after the worst of it, checking for men still breathing whose bodies might be saved or those who need a merciful hand to help them pass. His side aches badly where someone slashed him, one ear hears less than it did before the fight, and one of his sockets throbs with excess blood, but at least he’s not the one gasping his last. He keeps his eyes peeled for movement, yet when he notices a particular creature trembling at the very shore where his inept prayers were heard, he stills.

A girl. Mud-caked, naked, and—Gods—crying.

He hauls the reins on Sweetfoot at once, dulling an instinct to charge forward and holding her in a rushed trot instead. “M’lady!” he calls from horseback. “M’lady, be not afraid!”

Your eyes lift, but the rest of you dwindles immediately. Arms come to cover your head and Duncan notices you’re stricken with grime wrists to elbows as if you were trying to make your way uphill on all fours. He dismounts with a small grunt and hunches on instinct. His arms spread wide and gentle, and before he knows it he’s murmuring as he would to a skittish thing. “Easy now,” he whispers. “Easy. I vow this to you—I am no threat. My name is… Ser D-Duncan The Tall. I won't hurt you.”

The title sits oddly in his mouth when he’s half-shrunken and on bent legs. As he comes closer, his cheeks begin hoarding warmth despite him, for the shape of you is visible and evident even at this angle. Breasts plastered to your thighs billow with each frightened breath. Your belly creases in the middle and clay tears and crumbles off your knees when you shudder. He sees nothing else, but in his chest an unbearable instinct to cradle you almost overcomes him.

His head turns to the side, so he watches you only with his eye’s corner. When he’s close enough, he undoes his cape, spreads it gently over your back and lets it fall over you. He has a fleeting thought on what kind of smell it must carry and whether that matters.

Only then does he see the dagger. It is clutched in your fist, half-hidden by mud and the hunch of your body, but iron is iron. His hand stills on the edge of the wool. For a breath he says nothing. A crying maid with a blade is still a maid with a blade, and fear can make a body quicker than training.

“Easy,” he says again, lower. “You needn’t use that on me.”

You stop trembling enough to lift your face. The blade drops. Then all at once you are on him, hands closing round his waist with such force Dunk rocks back on his heels. Something reaches him through wool and shaking breath. Unintelligible mutter. Then—found me. And again, softer, urgent with respite. Knew you would. Knew you’d find me.

For a moment he does nothing but stand there with his own arms half-raised, startled clean through. Then they come round you, shy and boyish. One hand settles between your shoulders. He rubs once, then again, broad and slow, as though you are a frightened colt and his hand might smooth you into sense. “There now,” he says, because it is what comes. “There now.”

Beneath the mud and the cold reek of the stream there is a smell to you he cannot place. Something green. Something sweet. It cuts strangely through blood and horse and churned earth. 

He lets you cling till your breathing eases enough to stop catching. When it eases, he gives your shoulders one careful squeeze and tries to look at your face without looking full at your face.

“M’lady,” he says. “Have you been hurt?” You shake your head against him. He swallows. “And your clothes—were you robbed?” There is a pause to that. Then you nod.

“Ah.” Dunk shuts his mouth on all the things that might follow that and does not ask them. “Well. I’ll take you to the village,” he says. “We’ll find something to put on your back, and someone to look you over.”

You do not let go, and he finds he does not much mind that. By now he is holding most of your weight besides. He means to set you back a little then, only enough to walk you to Sweetfoot, but the moment he loosens his hold your legs betray you. They fold queerly with the loose, witless give of limbs that do not know their own business. Dunk catches you fast under the arms before your knees can strike earth. 

Some hurt in the low back, he thinks. Or the spine knocked wrong. He has seen men go slack in the limbs from less.

“Easy,” he says again, lower now. “I’ve you.”

Your head comes up. There is mud on your cheek, tears dried in bright tracks through it. Up close the sight of you lands worse on him than it did before. Such beauty in such a place. Such beauty at all. If someone asked him later, he would have no better answer than that.

“May I carry you?” he asks.

You nod.

He gathers the cape tight first, fingers making poor work of it. Then he crouches so you may put your arms round his neck. When you do, your face comes so near he feels the warmth of your breath on his mouth. His own has gone dry. “I will lift you now,” he says, for want of anything wiser.

One arm behind your back, the other under your knees. He brings you up. The pull in his side is vicious enough to whiten his sight for a blink, but he only grunts and holds you the tighter for it. You are light to him. Light should not be so difficult.

Sweetfoot turns her head and blows at the sight of you in Dunk’s arms. “Mind yourself,” Dunk mutters, and means the horse, and himself, and perhaps the day entire.

Getting you into the saddle proves ugly work. There is no good way to manage a naked maid wrapped in a cloak when one hand is wanted for decency, the other for balance, and his side seems set on parting company with him. He stands a moment with his jaw shut hard, then does it the only way such things ever get done—awkwardly.

“M’lady,” he says, hot-faced, “I must set you before me.” You only look at him with those wide, strange eyes and make no complaint.

He gets one boot to stirrup, hauls himself up enough to raise you after, and nearly fumbles you when the cloak slips and his forearm feels the bare warmth of your back through the wool. Heat runs through him so fast it feels wrong. He gets you right the second time by sheer stubbornness, settles you before the saddle-bow, then adjusts behind with a grunt he prays sounds like effort.

It does not improve matters.

There is no room worth speaking of. You sit before him with your hair damp and knees thrown to one side, and Dunk must put an arm round your middle the moment Sweetfoot moves or see you slide clean off. He has no notion what one does with a girl in such a fix. Horses, boys, wounds, armour, hard roads, those he understands. A maiden fair as vision and shaky in the limbs, is another matter. He finds himself hoping there is some widow in the village with a stern face and capable hands who might take one look at you and know everything he does not. Then he may ride on to Riverrun with peace in his mind.

The thought sits well enough till you lean back. A little more weight at each step, whether from weariness or trust he cannot tell. Soon your back is to his chest and your hair keeps straying under his chin. He has to look somewhere, so he looks at your hands on Sweetfoot’s neck.

Mud is dried in the lines of your palms and packed black beneath your nails. The nails themselves are pale in a way he mislikes. A drowned sort of blandness, as though the blood had only lately remembered to leave them. His hand closes harder on the reins.

What befell you? Robbed, you had said—no, nodded. Robbed of clothes and the strength in your legs. Robbed near of your wits, to be found bare and weeping on the skirts of slaughter. His mind offers up answers and every one of them is ugly.

“You are safe enough for now,” he says, because the words come and because he wants them said. “We’ll have you among decent folk directly.”

You say nothing. Perhaps doze. Perhaps you only listen. When Sweetfoot steps through a rut, your head tips back against him for an instant, and Dunk’s arm goes firmer round your waist.

Riverrun can wait an hour. Even a day, if it must. First the village. Clothes. Food. A woman to tend you. Then he will know what ought be done.

He keeps his eyes ahead and rides. When the road begins to thicken with huts and kitchen smoke he turns Sweetfoot toward the first cottage with a swept patch of yard and washing strung on a line. A hen darts from underhoof squawking. Dunk reins in, slides down, and reaches up for you.

The door opens before he can knock. A broad woman with red wrists and a face like a hatchet stands in the threshold, takes in Dunk, the horse, the cloak-wrapped girl in his arms, and narrows her eyes. “I can explain,” Dunk says, which is a poor beginning and sounds like one besides.

“Can you?” she says.

Heat climbs his neck. “I found her by the stream yonder. She’s been robbed, I think. She’s got no clothes, and her legs are none too steady. I thought—” He falters, then tries again. “I thought a woman might better see to her.”

The woman looks past him to your face. Something in hers shifts, not softer exactly, but less sharp. “Well, I am a woman,” she says. “Bring her in, then, you great oaf, and stand there bleeding on my threshold no longer.”

Dunk ducks his head and does as he’s bid. The cottage is low-ceilinged and close with the smell of onions and wool. He sets you down where the woman tells him, though not without trouble, for your legs go queer under you again and your hand catches in his sleeve with sudden force. “You are safe,” he says under his breath.

Your fingers tighten. “Please,” you whisper. “Do not leave.”

That near aches him more than the clinging had. “I’ll be just outside,” he says, for the woman is already flapping a hand at him to get out and because there is no fitting place for him in a room where a maid must be dressed. “Only outside. I vow it.”

A beat. Then, you let go. The door shuts on him. Dunk stands in the yard with a hand pressed to his side. Through the wall come the dim sounds of women’s voices, yours low and strange, the older one brisk and practical. Once there is a clatter. Once a silence long enough to make him straighten from the fence-post he had leaned on. He is thinking whether it would be madness to knock when the woman steps out at last, wiping her hands on her apron.

“Well?” Dunk asks.

“Well, nothing’s broke,” she says. “No fever that I can feel, no wound worth speaking of. She’s frightened half witless and weak in the legs, that’s all. Hungry, too, I’d say. May be she took some knock to the head. May be she was born a little moon-touched. Hard to say.”

Dunk blinks at her. “She knows her own name?” he asks.

The woman gives him a look. “She knows enough.”

That does not answer much, but before he can find a better question the door opens and you come out.

The clothes hang on you as they would on a child dressed from a dead woman’s chest: a coarse shift, a faded gown, sleeves a touch too short, hem uncertain, boots big enough to host toes twice as long as yours. Your hair has been pushed back from your face with damp hands. Your legs still look unsure of themselves. Dunk moves before thinking and takes you by the elbows when you waver on the step. “There now,” he murmurs. “Steady.”

You look up at him with such plain relief that his grip gentles.

The woman snorts softly behind you. “Take her home, then.”

Dunk clears his throat. “Aye. That is—” He looks down at you. “Where is your home, m’lady?”

Your hand comes up and closes over his forearm. “There is nothing for me there,” you say. Your fingers tighten. “Please.”

He opens his mouth, then shuts it. “I am bound for Riverrun,” he says at last. “I’ve business there. I cannot—”

“That is where I am going,” you say quickly. “The last place where I have anything. Please. Take me with you.”

Dunk stares. It may be nonsense. It may be the plain truth. It may be only the talk of a girl too frightened to be left among strangers. He cannot tell. What he can tell is the feel of your hand on his arm, the look of you trying not to sway where you stand, and the knowledge that if he leaves you here, he will think on it all the road to Riverrun and probably every road after.

The woman folds her arms and watches him make a misery of the choice. “Well?” she says.

Dunk lets out a breath. “I can take you as far as Riverrun,” he says, still looking at you. “No farther promised than that.”

Your smile is answer enough. Later, when doubt gets into him, it will be one of the things he reaches back for.

Soon after the village, Duncan finds himself about a number of tasks he had not meant to take on. He accepts the pity bundle of more garments from the woman, all of them light. He lifts you to the saddle, then goes back for Chestnut and Thunder. He loses the mark of his back, gathers his scant belongings, counts them, and thinks of the trouble of one bedroll. Riverrun lies four nights off, and his purse is too light for inns along the way. He shifts the saddle on Chestnut till it will hold you steady enough, then goes through the poor store of cloth he owns to see whether there is anything fit to spare you. At last he finds a blanket little better than rough army issue and ties it round your shoulders with a length of string.

When he is done, he steps back to look at you and nearly laughs for the misery of it. A strange girl with no place to go, less worldly goods than he has, a queer way of speaking, and legs that seem only half-convinced by land—and here he is, setting his road to her pace as though this were a sensible thing. Duncan knows well enough what sort of fool he is. Dunk the Lunk, thick as a castle wall, slow as an aurochs. Still, his mouth pulls into a shy half-smile.

“Ready?” he asks.

The world of men continues to bewilder. They kill each other relentlessly and let the bodies rot out in the fields until crows find them. They speak oddly. They wear clothes. Rough things that scratch the skin round armpits and knees, and make their beasts wear clothes too. They walk on two imbalanced legs that have less sense to them than you would ever think they have, which end with feeble little things that need the most woeful instrument imaginable to stay protected—shoes.

The pain comes on you late. At first everything is so strange that the cuts in your feet barely matter. Then, just as you get the first grasp on how to walk on those fleshy stilts, an old woman gives you a shift, a skirt that wedges itself between your thighs, stockings that roll beneath your knees, and a pair of disgusting animal-skin things that make the wound across your sole press and bleed, press and bleed. You could fit another set of those ugly little toes into them and still they’d knock your ankles raw. Duncan seems to think your wits were rumbled sideways by whatever befell you, and sighs through his nose each time you try a few wobbling steps before giving up and tossing you from one place to another. From doorstep to horseback. From horseback to ground. From ground back to horseback again. Then, the horse takes over the carrying.

None of this matters greatly. None of it rubs you wrong in any way, because your knight has found you and agreed to take you to Riverrun, of which you know only that it is overrun with rivers and mean spirits, and you want nothing to do with either. You want everything to do with him, though, so you let the beast called Chestnut carry you toward it and knock your newly acquired arse against the hard leather of her saddle.

You glance at him often, only to make certain you were right to choose him, but Duncan proves worth every bruise on your buttocks. He is prettier close by. Washed of blood, his face goes almost holy at moments—too open and clean in the look of it—then a shift of shade will catch under the brow and jaw and make a man of him again so suddenly it gives you pause. His arms are strong enough to carry a girl like you. His heart, plainly, is soft enough to help one and trust one within the space of a single hesitant breath.

That softness lives in him in sly places. Not only in the face, though the face does its share. In the stammer that catches him when he is too aware of himself. In the way he asks leave before he touches you, as though a thing may be both necessary and solemn. In how he handles even his own size like it might alarm somebody if set down too hard. You begin to see that the boyishness in him is not only a matter of smooth cheeks and dark lashes and that honest mouth. It lives deeper. Some tender piece of him has made it to his great age uncrushed.

You have no notion what he knows of love. His lips look unkissed, which strikes you at once as improbable and agreeable. Kissable all the same. So are his cheeks, if it comes to that, and the hollows under his eyes look made for the brushing of thumbs in acts of pity or fondness or whatever human girls do when they mean to soothe a man. You think, in the stupid way of girls, that it may be just as well if he knows nothing. You know very little yourself. The males of your kind are greedy, quarrelsome creatures who would bite the shine off a scale if they thought it theirs by right. The tenderest kiss you have ever given in all your life was to a trout, and that was mostly because it was dying.

Still, you know enough to know this: there is something dear in a creature so large keeping such a breakable heart inside him. Duncan feels safe to you in the way deep water once did. Not because he could not drown you if he wished, but because every part of him seems arranged against wishing it.

The road, of course, is another matter. It goes on and on, pale and hard beneath the horses, made by men for reasons men must have found clever. When there is no canopy the sun comes down bare and mean, scorching your face, your scalp, the tender tops of your hands. Dust lifts and settles in your throat. The saddle knocks under you with a steady, sour persistence, and after a while even wonder thins into boredom. You cannot understand why anyone would choose such a path. Roads have no give. They hold the day’s heat. They are full of stones and wheel-ruts and the old droppings of beasts. Water, at least, takes your shape when it carries you.

But then, toward evening, the land alters. Light begins to bleed richer colours over everything. It gathers in the grasses and tips the hedges. It slicks itself along the backs of flies until the air is full of brief, burning specks. The trunks of trees grow black on one side and warm on the other, and the far fields seem to have been brushed by something molten and low. From the height of Chestnut’s back, you see land from its own heart for the first time: furrow, ditch, thorn, moss, little stones shining in the road, the long back of the world lifting itself toward dark.

The dying sun finds Duncan too. It catches in his hair until the auburn of it wakes with red-gold hidden under it, banked fire stirred by a stick. All of him brightens: cheek, ear, the blunt line of his nose, the great slope of shoulder under travel-stained cloth. When the sun begins to go, his colours come alive. It seems unfair that a thing may grow more beautiful just when the light is going, as if it was never meant to be kept.

“M’lady?” His voice pulls you from the sky. You turn your head and find him watching you from Sweetfoot’s back. “Are you tired?”

You consider this. “Tired of what?”

He blinks.

“Sitting on a beast?” you ask.

A sound leaves him then, low and huffed through his nose. “Aye. Riding can weary a body. We should make camp soon. It will be dark before long.”

You look him over for signs of weariness, but he shows none that you can read. He sits tall enough, broad enough, with the reins easy in one hand and the dust on him as if it has been there all his life. “The road is hard,” you allow. “The beast is delightful.”

At that you lean forward and wrap both arms around Chestnut’s neck. Chestnut blows out a pleased breath and dips her head as if she agrees with you entirely.

Duncan stares for a moment. Then his mouth presses itself into a line and he looks back to the road.

“Do people always choose paths this hard?” you ask.

“This?” he says. “This is no hard road. It’s straight, and flat enough, and there’s no great wind to cut at us. There are harder paths than this.”

You frown. “Why would anyone take a harder path?”

“Sometimes they must.”

You consider that gravely. Men do seem fond of arranging misery into rules and then obeying them.

After another little while, Duncan says, “Keep your eyes peeled for a place to camp, if there is one you like.”

Your hand lifts before he has finished speaking. “There.”

He follows the line of your finger. There is only a thick tangle of trees and bramble ahead, with sun lying through the branches. “There?” he says.

“By the water.”

He looks again, slower this time, as if water may show itself out of courtesy. “There ain’t water there, m’lady.”

“There is.”

His gaze comes back to you. It is a look you dislike before you understand it. Careful. Mild. The look given to a creature who has said something foolish and might be frightened if the foolishness is named aloud. Pity sits in it, thinly covered.

Heat pinches under your ribs. “Beyond those trees,” you say. “Where the sun takes aim. There is water.”

Duncan shifts in the saddle. For a moment it seems he means to answer. Instead he only draws a breath and turns Sweetfoot’s head. “All right, then.”

The gentleness of it makes the pinch in you flare hotter. The males of your own kind speak so when they wish to make you small. Little thing, pretty thing, witless thing. They forget how quickly a little thing can open a throat when she has teeth and a mind to use them. How a male may reach for you in the weeds, grinning, and only know himself dead when his fingers will no longer close because all the blood has run out of them.

You say nothing. Chestnut follows Sweetfoot off the road and into the green press, Thunder trots close behind with all of the belongings clinking at his sides.

Branches drag over your shoulders. Leaves brush your face and catch in your hair. The ground grows softer almost immediately, darkening underhoof. You hear it before he does, of course: the low, glassy talk of water over stone, hidden under bird-call and the rasp of insects. A moment later Duncan hears it too. His head lifts. Sweetfoot’s ears prick forward. He urges her on a little faster without looking back.

The trees thin, and beyond them lies a small bed of grass pressed close to a clear stream running lazy under evening light. A willow grows at the bank with its long hair fallen into the water, making a green chamber beneath it. The surface holds the last of the sun in broken pieces and lets them go again.

Duncan reins in. At first, he only looks. “Well,” he says at last, quiet and baffled. “Gods be good.” You sit straighter on Chestnut’s back when he turns to you. “How did you know?”

Your chin lifts, because even though he has no right to know, you are a proud creature. “I am not so witless as you think me, knight.”

At that his face changes. The bafflement stays, but something troubled comes into it too. “I never thought you witless,” he says.

Instead of dignifying that with a response, you begin getting off Chestnut. It seems simple enough. One leg must go somewhere, then the other after it, and the ground waits below with its usual bad intentions. You slide halfway down the saddle and there the business collapses. Your skirt catches, one foot finds nothing. Your hands clutch at leather and mane, and you are left hanging from the side of the beast in a deeply humiliating fashion, breathing hard through your nose.

Duncan is there before you make a fool of yourself entire. His hands span your waist through the shift, large and warm and terribly sure. He lifts you down as if the effort costs him nothing, though you have seen the way his side catches sometimes when he thinks you are looking elsewhere.

“I only meant,” he says, setting you on the grass with more care than the world deserves, “you keep surprising me.”

You say nothing to that. Only look at him from close by, and shamelessly so. He is shy for a lad this big. It pleases and worries you in equal measure. It makes you wonder, briefly and without comfort, whether he will know what to do with you at all. Whether he knows how men put themselves between the legs of women who want them so dearly. Whether, third night from this one, the witch will have the soul she grinned for.

Before you can ask, Duncan looks away. “You may bathe, if you like,” he says. “Under the willow there. I’ll start a fire. See to some food. Water the horses after.” Then he turns from you with the haste of a sailor escaping a sinking ship.

The first thing you lose is the shoes. You wrench them off and drop them in the grass with hatred. The cut across your sole still presses when your foot meets earth, but at least it is no longer trapped against leather, forced to bleed and bleed in its own little prison. The stockings go next, or try to. They roll and cling beneath your knees like pale eels. Then, the blanket. You tug at the ties and laces and strings, cross with their stubbornness, then only angrier. Human clothes are full of tricks and no kindness. At last, with a tired grunt, you pull the shift up over your head.

Behind you, wood clatters. You look round.

Duncan stands a few feet away with firewood scattered at his boots. His mouth has parted. For one suspended moment he simply gapes. Then flush climbs fiercely round his ears, up his neck, into his face, and he drops into a crouch to gather the sticks as if they have become suddenly precious.

“M-m’lady,” he says, strangled. “You oughtn’t—Seven save me—you oughtn’t undress before a man you scarce know.”

You stare at him.

“I thought you meant to go beneath the willow,” he goes on, still looking hard at the twigs. “Out of sight. I thought—what are you doing? Have you never been on the road? Or near men? Or near folk at all?”

An instinct pinches you, strange and unwelcome, to cover your chest. You do, though slowly, and with no clear idea why. He looks as if you have done him some harm. “It is only flesh,” you say. “You have flesh too. What is so wicked about mine that you cannot look?”

He makes a small, suffering sound and bends lower over the firewood. “My flesh is—” He stops. Swallows. Tries again. “It is different.”

You glance down at yourself, then at him. “How?”

His hand closes on a stick so tightly the bark cracks. “M’lady, I beg you.”

“For what?”

“For pity,” he says, so miserably that your brows lift. “It is improper, is all. A maid shouldn’t—And I don’t mean to have you think I’m that sort of man. I am trying to do good by you.”

He sounds so nervous your annoyance falters. Only for a moment.

You pick up the shift and hold it to your chest, then begin toward the bank. Walking still feels like being made to argue with the earth. Each step must be planned, lowered, endured. Too much pressure and the pain flares white-hot. Too little and your knee goes soft. Your feet seem stupidly far away from the rest of you, little traitors sent ahead to ruin your dignity.

You stop beside him. Duncan bows his head even lower, as though your bare ankle might strike him blind.

“Do you dislike women’s bodies?” you ask.

The sound he makes then is very nearly a whine. “Please, m’lady. Spare me. I am only a hedge knight. I am trying—please.”

You huff at him. “Forgive me for tormenting you with some skin.” Then you limp on beneath the willow’s hanging hair.

There, hidden by the long green fall of it, you strip with more temper than grace and lower yourself toward the stream. This is going poorly. Your knight does not seem at all like the men you have watched from the shallows, those shore-men who seize their lovers round the waist and press them down laughing in the dark, bodies gleaming, mouths so sinful your tail once twitched hard enough to stir silt. Duncan behaves as though the sight of you is a trial set by cruel gods.

At least there is water.

The stream receives you kindly, though changed skin and sealed ribs make even kindness strange. You lie back over its cool sheet and drift where it is deep enough to hold you, looking up through the willow leaves as they sieve the last gold from the sky. The current slips beneath your new body, uncertain around the parts it no longer knows, and you let it carry what little of you it still can.

Duncan remains crouched over the scattered firewood long after you limp beneath the tree, ears burning as though someone has boxed them both. The stream talks quietly behind him. The horses crop at the grass.

He has no answer for what has just happened. None he likes, anyway.

You are strange. Stranger than any girl he has known, though known is too large a word for the few girls that ever had cause to look twice at him. Your face is strange too, in how open it is. He has not seen one so plain and easy to read since he was a boy looking down into still puddles and finding his own there. He can tell when you are baffled. When you are tired. When you are pleased. When you are angry.

Now you are angry. Likely under the willow still wearing that fierce little frown, cross with him because he turned his eyes away. That is the oddest part. Most maids, he thinks, would be angry with a man for gaping. You seem wounded that he did not gape longer.

He did gape. Only a heartbeat, maybe, before sense struck him like a thrown stone, but a heartbeat can be a mean long while when a girl stands bare in afternoon light. He saw the lift of your breasts before your arms came up, full where the borrowed shift had hidden them, and prickling with river-cool air. He saw the narrow give of your belly, the line where ribs fell into waist, the dark crease of shadow beneath. Enough. More than enough. Too much for a man meant to be gathering sticks and doing honourable things with his hands.

You asked how your flesh was different from his. The terrible thing is he would only need to stand up to show you.

That thought near makes him groan aloud. He jams another stick into the small pit he has scraped clear with his boot and starts arranging kindling with far more care than kindling deserves. Fire. Food. Horses. Bedroll. Those are proper troubles. Those can be solved with hands and a bit of sense.

The bedroll is the worst of them. Four nights to Riverrun. A purse too light for inns unless he means to arrive there hungry and horseless. He pokes at the kindling and gives himself over to a hard, practical anguish.

When the fire catches, he goes to see to the horses. Sweetfoot accepts his hand with her usual calm. Chestnut, traitor that she is, blows warm air straight into his face and tosses her head toward the willow.

“Oh, have you a new favourite?” Duncan mutters. Chestnut chews at nothing, looking pleased with herself. “Aye. Good. All of you against me, then.”

He returns to the fire with what food he has: one mangy rabbit still fit for roasting, a clutch of withered potatoes that have begun trying to become more potatoes, and bread gone hard enough to argue with a knife. He has had worse meals. Many worse. Still, he finds himself worrying whether it will be enough for a tender-mouthed creature like you, whether you are used to finer things, softer things, things served by hands that have never been black with battlefield mud.

The whole day sits oddly in his skull. Morning had found him still full of war. Blood from the day before. The sour stink of men opened for no good reason. Boys felled in the grass with their eyes gone milky and their mothers’ names drying on their tongues. He had been angry then, in a slow thick way, at killing and lords and banners and all the great heavy wheels that roll over little bodies until no one can tell what shape they had.

Then he found you by the stream, naked, half-wild with fear, concussed or close enough, begging him without quite begging to take you with him. Now you are angry because he would not stand there and leer at your tits.

Duncan understands horses better than people. Dogs too. Even mules, ugly-hearted beasts though they can be. A horse gives warning before it kicks. A dog shows teeth before it bites. People smile, weep, lie, ask strange questions, go hurt in places a man cannot see. You escape even the small customs he has managed to learn.

He lifts his eyes from the rabbit just as the wind moves the willow’s hanging hair aside. Through the green gaps, he sees you.

You are floating on your back where the stream broadens under the tree, arms spread loose on either side, legs moving slowly beneath the skin of the water. The last light scatters over you in pieces. A knee and a hip. The small rise of your belly. Water darkens and brightens as it crosses you, breaking your shape and making it whole again. Your hair fans out around your head. Your eyes are closed, mouth parted, and the stream slips between your lips as though you have invited it.

Duncan ought to look away, but the boy he is, he doesn't.

There is enough of you on display to shame a septa dead in her robes. Breasts, thighs, the place between them blurred and shown by water in turns. Yet your face holds him worst. The peace of it, the ease of it. Stripped of cloth and terror and all the hard rules that seem to trouble you, you look newly made and older than the earth together. Not human, he thinks. Then he feels wicked for it, because you are a girl, and hurt, and under his protection.

Still, you look like one of those goddesses men carved in old stones before the Seven came, the kind Duncan knows nothing about except that a wiser man would kneel or run. You look pleased to have the world off your skin. No wonder you shed clothing like a snare.

The willow falls back into place. Green covers you again. Duncan looks down at the rabbit, jaw tight, and turns it over the flame before it can make it to coal. He scolds himself too, keeps muttering Ser Arlan's little knightly preachings to tear his mind away from what boys think about, and back to what sworn swords should think about.

The stream sloshes and plops with the sound of a body being dragged out of it. There, Dunk wonders what exactly to do, because he knows well enough you are no good at walking yet, but finds himself in the grip of a strange preference. He would rather let the stumble happen and rush to help than prevent it outright, if prevention means enduring another comparison of flesh.

Soon enough, he catches you limping from the corner of his eye to the heart of his vision. You come to sit beside him much too close for his peace. The cold of the river comes off you plainly, running against the heat of his shoulder where yours nearly touches. Damp has darkened your hair and set loose drops along your neck. Before he can shift away without making it an insult, you arrange yourself with great importance and announce, “There. Modest.”

Dunk looks. Stupidly, but he does. He has never known cloth to be a thing worthy of praise. Cloth is only cloth. A courtesy. A barrier. A way for decent folk to go about the world without setting fire to one another’s ears. Yet in his want to tell you that you have done well, he stabs his own foot clean through.

The linen has clung to you everywhere it ought to have had the manners to hang loose. Breast, belly, the small inward draw of your waist—all made plainer by water and the thinness of the shift. The blanket lies in a heap too near the fire, abandoned as though wool has somehow offended you.

He holds the lump in his throat from becoming a sound. Then he reaches for the blanket, shakes the worst of the grass from it, and puts it over your shoulders with as much solemn care as if he were robing a queen. He draws it close beneath your throat and tucks one edge over the other.

“You’ve not dried yourself off,” he says. “Cold, aren’t ye?”

You look at him for a moment. Then, there's a nod, and, thank the Seven, your hands take over the keeping of the blanket at your breastbone. The lump in Dunk's throat loosens.

He busies himself with the food. The rabbit has given what it can to the pot, which is less than a rabbit ought to give and more than nothing. The potatoes have softened. The bread will have to be chewed with conviction. He ladles the thin pottage into one of his wooden bowls and passes it to you.

You take it in both hands and eye it with open suspicion. “What is this?”

“Supper,” he says.

You smell it.

“It ain’t much,” Dunk goes on, because the look on your face begins to trouble him. “Only rabbit and some potatoes, and the bread’s gone hard. Still, you ought to eat. There’s a day on the road ahead, and you’ve had naught in you since—” He stops, because he does not know since when. “A while, I’d wager.”

He expects disappointment, perhaps. Revulsion, if you are some lord’s daughter after all, though what lord’s daughter finds herself naked and half-drowned by a stream is beyond him.

Instead, you look bewildered. “You made this?”

Dunk blinks. “A-aye, m’lady.”

You dip your fingers in before he can offer a spoon. The first bite goes into your mouth carefully, as though supper may have sharp bits within it. Then your face changes.

It is a small thing, merely a lifting of brows and mouth pausing round the taste. Then you take another bit, and another, hotter than is wise, huffing through it and laughing once under your breath as though the whole notion of cooked rabbit has played some clever trick on you. Grease shines at the corner of your mouth. You lick it away with no shame at all.

“This is good,” you say, and sound surprised by your own gladness. “This is very good.”

Dunk is bewildered. It is one kind of cruelty to tease him and huff at him for trying his best at decency and failing, another to make a jest out of him and his hedge-ridden status. He looks down into his own bowl.

“Must you mock me?”

You stop chewing at once. The mouthful is too large to swallow cleanly, but you do it anyway and wince as it goes down. “Mock you?” you ask. “Why would I?”

“It’s only rabbit,” he mutters. “And mangled potatoes. You needn’t make a show of it.”

The hurt that comes into your face lands in him badly.

“I did not mean to hurt you,” you say. “Forgive me. I only meant—I would not be able to make this.” A pause. “Or start a fire, for that matter.”

Dunk lifts his head. “You do not know how to start a fire?”

You look at him a moment too long, then back into the bowl. “I’ve never needed it.”

That answer is another strange stone set on the growing pile of you. He gives a low hum and scrapes at his own supper with the spoon. “Well,” he says after a moment, rough with regret. “I beg your pardon, then. If you truly enjoy it, I am glad.”

Your eyes lift. “I do. Truly.”

Knowing it is true does something worse than the praise did. It catches him off guard and warms him under the breastbone, soft and dangerous. He leans back on one hand, taking you in. Half-smile, bare feet peeking from beneath the blanket, bowl clutched as though it contains some small wonder.

“So,” he says, because his mouth is safer when it is trying to crack an unresolvable riddle, “you’re a lady who cannot cook, cannot start a fire, and despises garments and shoes, but has some queer prescience when it comes to finding a body of water. Hm?”

Silence only, then a wide-eyed glance.

“Peculiar,” Dunk says.

“I do not understand why men wear so much cloth anyway,” you say, picking at the blanket where it sits under your chin. “What is peculiar is to have skin so feeble—”

There, your voice dies. Dunk has gone very still with his spoon halfway to his mouth. “Men?” he says.

You blink.

“You are people too,” he says, after a beat.

The words are gentle enough, but they come with a puzzled furrow between his brows, as though he is trying to set you in the proper place and cannot find the shelf. He takes another mouthful and chews it slowly. “Have you worn lighter cloth before, then? Before… all this?”

Before the stream, he means. Before the mud. Before the village woman and the borrowed gown. Before whatever thing he has decided happened to you.

Your fingers tighten round the bowl. “Lighter, yes.”

“How light?”

You give him a careful look.

Dunk seems to understand his mistake before you answer. Red returns to his ears with comic speed. “Never mind. You needn’t— That was no question to ask a maid.”

You consider him. “Do you not often see women naked?”

He chokes. It is only a little choke, but enough to make him turn his face and thump one fist against his chest. “Gods,” he says when he has breath again. “M’lady.”

“I am only asking.”

“Aye, well. Some questions ought to be asked with more care.”

“Why?”

“Because they—” He looks at you, then away, then helplessly down to his lap. “Because they put thoughts in a man’s head.”

“What thoughts?”

His mouth opens. Shuts. You lean closer, interested so plainly Dunk near suffocates on air that suddenly feels chewable in his mouth. “Do women’s bodies trouble all men so badly, or only hedge knights?” you ask.

He makes the suffering sound again. Quieter this time, but telling all the same. “I've seen women,” he says, with the grave misery of a fool walking barefoot over hot coals. “Some. A few. In bathhouses, once or twice by mistake. On the road, folk are not always private as they ought be. And, uh—” He clears his throat so hard it sounds painful. “And in places where women are paid to be looked at.”

You stare. “Paid?”

“Aye.”

“To be looked at?”

“Among other things.”

“What other things?”

Dunk puts his bowl down. You wait. He looks into the fire as if the flames might take pity on him and leap high enough to swallow his face. “Things between men and women.”

“What things?”

“Married things,” he says, too quickly.

“Only married people do them?”

His eyes close briefly. “No.”

“Then why call them married things?”

“Because I am trying to keep this talk decent,” Dunk huffs.

You frown into your supper. “Have you done them?” you ask.

It is such a rude and forthright question it strikes bone in him, though somehow it does not quite offend. His face pulls tight. The flush burns hotter, but something under it draws inward, shy and sore and young.

“N-no,” Duncan says, small.

You lean closer, as if trying to match him in secrecy lest his horses suddenly recognise human tongue. “Never?”

“No.”

“Why?”

He gives a small, helpless shrug. “I’ve had no wife.”

“But you said folk do these things without wives.”

“Aye, some do.” He groans then, low and exasperated, dragging one hand over his mouth. “Gods.”

“But you do not.”

“No.”

“Why?”

His thumb moves over the rim of his bowl. There is dirt under the nail, a split at the knuckle, the hand of a man who knows fire and reins and sword-hilts and very little of where to put himself when a girl asks him plain questions in the dusk.

“Seemed wrong, most times,” he says. “Or costly. Or I was too young. Or too big and stupid and slow to know what was wanted till the chance had gone.”

He goes quiet after that, hoping it is enough of a confession to satisfy you. Another part of him wonders what business he has entertaining the whim at all. A puzzle of a girl you are, that is for certain. Strange in your questions, in your frowns, in the careless tilt of your head when you hear a thing you cannot place.

Then a thought comes on him, tender and stupid enough to shame him: is this another chance he cannot recognise while it is being given? He lifts his face to check yours for some sign of what he imagines a lustful glance might be, though he has no real notion what he expects to find there. Heat? Mischief? Some womanly knowledge he would know when he saw it? Before he can make any proper fool’s study of you, you ask another question.

“Do you like kissing?”

You might as well have picked up a knife by the blade. “I—” His throat works. “I suppose I might.”

“You suppose?”

He breathes heavy. His skin surely can’t get any hotter, so he answers, “I have kissed.”

Your eyes brighten at that, keen enough to make him regret the disclosure at once. “How many times?”

Duncan laughs then, though there is little mirth in it. Nerves, mayhaps. Or the pure severity of you sitting there with rabbit grease on your mouth, asking after his kisses as if counting apples in a basket. He has admitted to being green and now sounds greener still. “Seven save me,” he whines.

“How many?”

“Enough to know a man should not count in front of a lady.”

“Was it good?”

The fire pops. Somewhere behind the pair of you one of the horses tears grass with its teeth. Dunk sits in deepening blushing silence.

You eat another bite. Hum, as if the flavours have managed to marry into something more delicious during the interrogation. “At the shore,” you say then, “men kiss women as if they are hungry.”

Dunk’s gaze snaps to you.

“I have seen it,” you add. “They hold them by the waist and put them down in the grass. Sometimes the women laugh. Sometimes they make sounds as if they are being bitten, but they keep their hands in the men’s hair, so I think they must like it.”

Duncan feels himself go past blushing into something worse. Stricken, feverish, and too aware of the place where his belly has kicked tight under your words. He cannot have you thinking him that sort of knight. Cannot sit here in the dark with you speaking of women pressed into grass and let his mind go where it has already begun to go.

“M’lady,” he says, and hears the plea in it himself. “I think we ought to try and get some sleep.”

“It is barely dark,” you say.

“It will be darker soon.”

“That happens whether we sleep or not.”

“Aye,” he says faintly. “So it does.”

You lick a bit of grease from your thumb. His eyes move there and away so fast he prays you miss it. “Do you want more supper?” he asks.

You smile into your bowl. “You are changing the subject.”

He smiles back, weakly. Hopes there is enough begging in it, though judging by your curiosity about every cursed thing under the moon, falling to his knees would only give you more to ask about. “I am… trying to save my soul.”

Your laugh comes out small and surprised, and it spills warm through his chest in a way that has no business being so pleasant.

“Eat,” he says. “Then sleep. There will be more road on the morrow, and you already hate the road.”

“I hate the shoes more,” you tell him.

“Aye. I had gathered.”

“And the stockings.”

“A terrible foe,” Dunk says, standing up.

“And the laces.”

“Cruel little beasts.”

You glance at him, something sharp and pleased on you. It is very difficult to keep thoughts from his head, foul thoughts, when you look like this. His heart softens a notch while the other parts of him harden, and before he is forced back to sitting, Dunk turns and tells you, “I’ll water the horses and prepare the bedroll for us.”

He does so. You follow him soon after, quiet-footed for once, and stop to eye the splay of oilcloth and old wool on the ground as if it is another human custom laid out for judgment.

Dunk clears his throat. “You should lie down. You’ve had a long day.”

That much, at least, you obey. You lower yourself carefully, one knee bending wrong at first, then righting with a frown that makes him look away before fondness can show too plainly on his face. He waits until you are settled, then pulls the blanket up over you and tucks it in at your shoulder. Only a little. Only enough to keep the night air off. His hand stills there for half a heartbeat before he draws it back.

Then he turns, draws his sword, and lays it down between the two sides of the bedroll.

It makes a good enough line. Honest steel. Cold steel. A better man than he is, perhaps, lying straight-backed where honour ought to be.

You watch him do it, and Dunk pretends not to notice.

Getting himself down beside you is less graceful than he would like. He lowers carefully, trying to favour the slash in his side, but the wound pulls anyway and a wince catches him regardless. He settles on his back at last with a breath through his teeth, one arm tucked behind his head, his body held a proper distance from the blade.

For a while there is only the fire. The horses. The soft working of water under the willow. But, of course, you must ask. “What is the sword for?”

Dunk shuts his eyes and opens them again. “For sleeping.”

You turn your face toward him. He can feel it without looking. “Are you afraid of me?”

“No,” he says quickly. “No, m’lady. It is only—” He searches for the words and finds only poor ones. “It is a boundary, like. For your honour.”

“My honour?”

“Aye.”

“Does it need steel?”

Dunk rubs a hand over his brow. “Mayhaps mine does.”

That comes out wrong enough to make him go still. He tries again before you can catch hold of it.

“I mean, it is proper. A man and a maid should not lie close without vows between them. Or kinship. Or—” He thinks of hedge knights, camp followers, drunk squires, road wives, all the world as it is rather than as septons pretend it to be. “Or some understanding.”

You hum. It is only a small sound, but it slips soft through the dark and goes straight into his groin. Pretty. Gods help him, even that is pretty. Your voice has no need of song to work on a man.

Dunk fixes his eyes on the sky. “I do not wish you to think ill of me,” he says, lower. “That is all.”

Another stretch of quiet. The fire clicks and collapses inward on itself.

“Do husbands and wives sleep like this too?”

Dunk's lids squeeze shut so hard they hurt.

He ought to answer. He knows he ought. It is a simple question, mayhaps, though no question of yours has proved simple yet. But he has no answer fit to give without inviting ten more behind it, each worse than the last. His side aches. His head aches. His body is a foe beside a sword that suddenly seems no wider than a blade of grass.

So Dunk lies very still and does his worst pretending to be asleep. After a moment, you hum again, as if you know perfectly well he is awake and have decided to let him keep the lie.

Wench, 

I find myself despising you more and more each passing day.

I have spent the better part of four moons surrounded by filthy mercenaries who smell of sweat and blood, and somehow you remain the most aggravating creature I have encountered in all of that time. I blame you entirely for the state of my mind. The men here seem convinced I am moments from slitting someone’s throat over a misplaced goblet, and perhaps I am. If you had not made me so accustomed to your company, I would not find everyone else so intolerable by comparison.

The fighting is dull now. It was enjoyable at first—I am sure you would understand. There is a clarity in battle that Lysene politics lacks. But the novelty has worn thin. We spend more time waiting than fighting, and idle men are irritating company. 

The captains insist that this contract is a worthwhile endeavor, but I fail to see how squabbling over half-starved bandits is meant to impress anyone. The men here fight well enough, I suppose, but they lack refinement. Most of them are brutes with more scars than sense. They stare at me after battle as though they have never seen a man fight with real skill before, which, considering the company they keep, may very well be true, but it is at least preferable to the simpering cowardice of Lyseni nobles. I have carved through enough men these past weeks to satisfy lesser appetites, yet I remain in poor temper regardless. Curious, that.

You, meanwhile, have written almost nothing of substance. Three lines in your last raven, and one of them was mocking me. You do not even bother to properly address or sign your letters. If you insist on corresponding so infrequently, you might at least have the decency to be detailed when you do so. It is nearly time for the midsummer festival, is it not? I wish that I were there. I am tired of this.

You’d best not entertain that pretender too heavily during the festivities either. You may think yourself clever for provoking this sort of reaction from me when I am too far to do anything about it, but I warn you now that my patience is not infinite and I do not forget insults easily. In fact, I forget very little where you are concerned, which is precisely why one particular detail in your letter has… stuck with me. You wrote that you returned to your chambers “late.” A curious choice of wording. Late with whom? Late doing what? You see how readily such vagueness invites suspicion. If you wish to avoid interrogation, you should be more precise.

Regardless, I suppose if you insist on tormenting me from afar, I deserve some form of repayment. Tell me exactly what you plan to wear for the festival this year. In detail.

Do not take too long responding this time. If your next raven contains another useless two sentences, I will see to it that the next time we meet, you will not have hands to waste with your mediocre writing skills anymore.

Yours,

A.T.

————————

My most illustrious and brilliant dragon prince,

You are becoming terribly dramatic in your exile from exile. I returned to my chambers late because the festivities lasted late, as festivities tend to do. There’s naught to do here but drink and fuck. Am I not allowed to entertain myself anymore? Haegon remains alive and moderately entertaining—he is enthralled by the tales of my campaigns in the east. Though I must say, your fixation with him is becoming somewhat concerning.

I plan to wear the black silks I wore to Magister Lorento’s revel—I am sure you recall the ones. You were quite fond of them. 

Your most beloved wench

(I do hope this address and signature suffice.)

————————

Wretched woman,

I send you half a dozen paragraphs detailing my days, and you only respond with barely two, and that loathsome address and signature? I would almost prefer the letters without them. 

You are fortunate that this raven reached me after battle rather than before it, otherwise I might have gutted the first man who spoke to me out of sheer irritation. “Moderately entertaining,” you say, as though that is meant to reassure me. I know precisely the sort of man Haegon Blackfyre is—vain enough to mistake your attention for affection and stupid enough to think himself special because you allow him near you. I dislike him more every time you mention his name. In fact, I am beginning to suspect that you only bring him up because you enjoy imagining how foul my temper becomes while reading your letters.

And yes, it does concern me. I am stranded on the mainland while you lounge about Lys in black silk beside a Blackfyre pretender who is apparently “moderately entertaining.” I think my fixation is entirely justified under the circumstances. Frankly, I find your lack of concern for my deteriorating state somewhat offensive. Another man is hearing stories that ought to be told to me and receiving smiles that ought to be directed elsewhere. Meanwhile, I am left in the company of mercenaries and whores. I find myself missing your incessant insults and aggravation—that alone should convey the severity of the situation.

As for the black silks, you should not wear them while I am away. I am entirely serious. The thought of you walking through the festival dressed in them while that Blackfyre whore trails after you has already ruined my evening. I hope this pleases you.

I miss you,

A.T.

————————

It pleases me immensely. You should not be so needy, prince—it makes you ugly. 

Though if it soothes your deteriorating state at all, you need not concern yourself with the black silks anymore. The First Magister’s guards caught a thief in my chambers several nights ago. A thief who curiously did not take any of my jewels, but instead tossed my favorite silks into the hearth. I assume this was your doing. Frankly, I find it difficult to believe anyone else would be deranged enough to send someone sneaking into my chambers over a dress.

Anyway, the festival was boring. Too much incense, too many musicians, too many people trying far too hard to impress one another. Haegon spent the better part of the evening attempting to convince me to accompany him back to Tyrosh after all of this is over—I’m sure you will enjoy imagining that. I drank enough cherry wine to tolerate the conversation and watched the First Magister interrogate half his household over my poor, murdered silks.

You would have hated it. I almost missed you enough to become sentimental about it. 

————————

Wench,

I did warn you that the Brightflame’s reach is endless, once, did I not? You only have yourself to blame, and you ought to consider yourself fortunate that I had them destroyed when you weren’t wearing them. Honestly, I thought the restraint displayed was admirable. 

In fact, I resent that you sound so amused by the entire affair. You accuse me of derangement while describing the incident with enough fondness that I suspect you enjoyed knowing someone was possessive enough to burn the damned thing in the first place.

As for Haegon Blackfyre, I am beginning to suspect he suffers from some lingering injury to the head if he truly believes you would willingly follow him anywhere. The fact that he asked at all offends me on your behalf. Even tolerating the offer was idiotic of you.

The company has become insufferably dull these past few weeks. The men drink, gamble, whore, boast about battles I could have won half-asleep, and then expect me to sit amongst them as though I find any of it remotely engaging. I have taken to sleeping later simply to avoid them. 

One of the captains attempted to drag me into some tavern two nights ago because he claimed I looked “morose.” I nearly split his skull for the observation alone. I am not morose. I am simply tired of sleeping in hot tents and waking to men shouting before sunrise. There is no conversation worth having here, no one capable of holding my attention for longer than a few minutes, and the whores have become intolerable now that I know what it is like to share a bed with someone who actually bites back.

Do not let this inflate your ego too terribly. I am merely observing that exile is considerably less entertaining without someone nearby to aggravate me properly.

A.T.

————————

Dragon prince,

You have become alarmingly soft, haven’t you? Complaining about lonely tents and disappointing whores in writing now? I’ll keep the proof of this tucked away safely, don’t you fret. What would your captains say if they knew the terrible Bright Prince spends his evenings sulking because no one nearby can keep up with him properly?

Still, I understand the feeling. 

I miss you. Try not to die of boredom before you return to me.

————————

Wench,

I have reread your pathetically short letter so many times over the past three days that one of the men finally asked whether the raven had delivered battle plans or a love confession. I nearly fed him his own teeth for the question. You should feel honored. Very few people survive long after becoming irritating in my presence lately.

Your timing, as usual, was atrocious. The raven arrived shortly before dawn, just as I was preparing to ride out with the others, and I made the mistake of reading your letter immediately. 

Do you have any idea what it does to a man to march into battle after reading the words “I miss you” in your hand?

Things here have worsened. The waiting is the worst part of it. Battle at least occupies the mind for a few glorious moments, but the hours before and after drag endlessly. The men drink and shout and boast while I sit there wondering what you might be doing in Lys. I find myself imagining your chambers with alarming frequency—whether you have filled them with half the city, or whether you are draped across that ridiculous nest of cushions on your balcony, a cup of wine in hand. Most days, I suspect you have found some unfortunate magister to torment for your own amusement.

It has become a genuine problem. I wake in foul moods now for reasons that have nothing to do with the campaign. Every morning, there is a brief moment where I expect to hear your endless complaints, only to remember that you are several hundred leagues away, making yourself everyone else's problem.

I dislike it immensely.

Before you, solitude was uncomplicated. I was perfectly content with my own company. Most people were tolerable only in small doses and became tiresome shortly thereafter. Then you appeared and ruined the arrangement entirely by insisting on inserting yourself into my life. 

Now I know things I never wished to know. I know the sound of your footsteps in a crowded hall. I know when you are drunk before you have spoken a word. I know the look you get when you are about to say something outrageous simply because you know it will irritate me. I can tell the difference between when you are genuinely angry and when you are merely seeking attention. Do you understand how disastrous this is for me?

And despite all of that, I think the truly humiliating part is that I would endure every miserable mile of this exile twice over if it meant returning to find you still waiting for me at the end of it. You see what you have reduced me to? It is revolting, and you will pay for it.

Do not take too long writing again. I find myself growing restless whenever the ravens are delayed now, and I dislike the sort of thoughts that begin occupying my mind in the silence between your letters.

Lamentably yours,

A.T.

————————

Aerion,

I received a raven from my brother this morning. The first in six years. 

Lys suddenly feels very small. Everyone keeps speaking to me, and I can scarcely hear them properly. Even Haegon has noticed something is wrong, which is irritating in its own right.

I do not know what to do anymore. I think things are changing. I am so tired.

————————

You are being terribly vague again, and ordinarily I would accuse you of doing it intentionally just to worsen my temper, but I suspect this time you scarcely realize you are doing it at all.

What did your brother say? More importantly, what do you intend to do now?

You write as though the ground beneath your feet has suddenly shifted. I do not like it. I like it even less because I am not there to see your face while you write these things.

The men here have begun speaking of movements within the Golden Company at last. I would ask directly whether you intend to leave Lys with them, but I suspect you would only become evasive out of spite if I did. So instead, I will simply remind you that disappearing without warning would be a very poor decision where I am concerned.

Write again soon. 

A.T.

————————

Your silence is beginning to aggravate me beyond reason.

At first, I assumed you were merely being cruel again. After several days, I concluded you had most likely become distracted by some revel or you were ignoring my ravens for your own amusement. It has now been twelve days, and I am running out of explanations that do not involve either catastrophe or deliberate malice on your part. I find both possibilities equally offensive.

I warned you before that I dislike silence where you are concerned.

Answer me immediately, even if it is only to insult me properly. 

A.T.

————————

You are testing my patience now.

Four ravens unanswered ceased being amusing weeks ago. If this silence is meant to provoke me, then congratulations—you have succeeded. Now answer me.

If your brother has filled your head with dreams of home and you intend to leave Lys with the Golden Company, then say it plainly instead of vanishing like a coward. I expect you to tell me yourself before I hear it from anyone else. Gods know you have never lacked for cruelty before, so why begin sparing me now? Do not make a fool of me.

And if you have truly decided to disappear from my life after spending months convincing me that I mattered to you, then I swear to every god still listening that I will never forgive you for it.

A.T.

————————

Wench,

It has been two moons. I have sent over half a dozen ravens. 

If you are alive, write back.

If you are angry, write back.

If you have decided to abandon Lys and chase whatever ghost your brother’s letter awakened in you, then write back and tell me that, too.

Just do not leave me waiting in this silence any longer.

A.T.

————————

“Oi, Brightflame,” a familiar voice drawls from his left as Aerion finishes cleaning his blade—your blade. The one you pressed into his hand before he left Lys a full year ago. His gaze flicks up, already incensed by the thought of you crossing his mind, and he raises his eyebrows questioningly. “We received word from Lys.”

Aerion’s heart skips a beat, grip tightening on the hilt of the sword. He rises to his feet, casting a questioning look over to the sellsword. A letter from you, maybe? You stopped sending them three moons ago, but what else could—

“The Golden Company raised their sails at dawn. Every ship in the harbor has sailed east.” 

East?!

————————

With the aid of King Yushan himself, letters had been dispatched toward the Northern Water Tribe requesting healers skilled enough to treat illnesses untouched by Earth Kingdom medicine.

You still remembered the flicker of hope that had swept through the estate once word spread that the King had personally involved himself in Renji's condition.

Then the refusals arrived.

The conflict surrounding the Fire Nation colonies had already poisoned relations throughout much of the world by then, and though Hujiang flourished independently beneath its own monarchy, it remained Earth Kingdom territory in the eyes of outsiders.

No foreign healers wished to risk political entanglement while tensions continued worsening across the continents.

You remembered the night your father received the final rejection.

The sound of splintering wood had echoed through the manor; it had been loud enough to wake servants from their slumber.

By the time you reached his study, shattered scroll cases littered the floor beside overturned furniture, while dark ink bled slowly across ruined documents beneath his desk.

You had never seen your father lose composure before.

Not once.

Yet he had stood there, amidst the wreckage, breathing so hard that his shoulders trembled beneath his robes, one hand still clenched tightly around parchment.

That had been the moment you truly understood your brother would die.

Afterward, you scarcely left Renji's side.

Even while illness hollowed him steadily over the passing months, your brother maintained himself with a dignity that often felt unbearable to witness.

Servants continued dressing him properly each morning due to the fact that he no longer possessed the strength enough to stand unassisted for very long, but whenever visitors entered his chambers, he still straightened his posture before greeting them with the same calm refinement expected of Advisor Shuren's heir.

Only once the doors closed again would exhaustion finally show itself.

You spent countless hours seated beside his bed, listening while he spoke about subjects neither of you truly cared about.

Renji discussed past court affairs, poetry he had recently reread, or your future with Prince Jinhai.

Anything except his illness.

Anything except death.

At times, he even pretended to sport enough strength to tease you whenever you arrived with red eyes from crying elsewhere within the estate.

"You look dreadful." He had murmured once while accepting tea with a trembling hand from his servants.

"If I recover only to discover my sister frightened away the Prince of Hujiang, I shall be deeply offended."

You had burst into tears immediately.

Renji laughed for nearly a minute despite the coughing fit it earned him.

Eventually, however, there always came a point where your presence was gently dismissed for the evening.

Servants would approach quietly, carrying fresh water, medicine, clean robes, and prepared meals. Renji barely touched anymore.

Physicians arrived so frequently that the scent of herbs became permanently embedded within the chambers, mixing so unpleasantly with incense and medicinal oils until even breathing there felt difficult.

And still, every morning, you returned beside him again.

Aside from your own company, which had ultimately been the only thing you could truly offer your brother during those final months, Gen had remained the most diligent in caring for him.

It became difficult to recall moments when he had not been nearby.

Whenever physicians arrived carrying new remedies from distant provinces, Gen stood beside them listening carefully to memorize every instruction before they were even repeated a second time.

When Renji grew too weak to hold chopsticks steadily, it was Gen who fed him without once allowing embarrassment to settle within your brother.

He changed the cooling cloths resting against your brother's fevered skin, helped him sit upright through coughing fits that left traces of blood staining handkerchiefs.

He remained awake through nights where the illness worsened enough that even servants feared sleeping too deeply.

And somehow, through all of it, Renji still treated him less like a servant and more like an extension of himself.

You remembered overhearing older attendants complain halfheartedly that your brother would sooner dismiss noble guests than Gen whenever he found himself irritated.

Renji trusted him recklessly, allowed him liberties no ordinary servant within Hujiang would ever dare approach, and though your father occasionally reprimanded such informality, even he eventually surrendered to it.

Gen had belonged to Renji in every sense beyond blood.

Yet despite how constantly he lingered near your brother, you had barely ever spoken to him properly yourself.

Whenever you visited Renji, your brother possessed a habit of sending everyone away almost immediately.

Physicians, attendants, servants—none survived his dismissals for very long once he decided he wished to speak privately with you.

Gen always obeyed without protest, lowering his head politely before disappearing beyond the doors until summoned again.

Those brief interruptions had been the only moments you truly noticed him at all.

If conversation ever passed between you, it rarely extended beyond practicality.

"Where is Renji?"

"In the eastern courtyard, my lady."

"Has my brother eaten yet?"

"Not yet, my lady."

Simple exchanges such as that, very forgettable things spoken in passing.

At the time, you knew Gen only through the stories attached to him.

The orphan your brother had dragged home from the merchant district after catching him attempting to steal food.

Your brother had dragged the bleeding child directly into your father's study and demanded that he remain.

The boy Renji had refused to abandon.

The servant who followed your brother everywhere with a loyalty so reverent it occasionally bordered on devotion.

Once, when you were younger, you had overheard Renji laughing while complaining that Gen copied everything he did.

Gen had looked offended by the accusation, and your brother nearly fell from his chair laughing.

It had been a warm memory once.

Nobody realized how deeply Renji had woven himself into the boy's entire world until the day he died.

You could still remember the sound porcelain made when Gen dropped the medicine tray from his hands.

The physicians had already stepped back quietly, their silence revealing the truth before any formal announcement ever could.

Your father stood beside the bed, unmoving, while you buried your face against his robes, grief consuming you as you sobbed against him.

Still, through your own crying, you had not missed Gen collapsing beside the bed.

His knees had struck the floor so hard that one of the physicians startled visibly, yet Gen seemed entirely unaware of anyone surrounding him.

Both hands clutched desperately at the blankets near Renji's arm while grief overtook him with an honesty so raw it had frightened you.

It was a complete heartbreak.

Perhaps that was why you remembered it so clearly.

Within noble households, grief was meant to be silent.

Servants mourned respectfully, family members endured condolences with restraint, and funerals unfolded through ritual before any emotion could disrupt the ceremony.

Gen did not know how to grieve politely.

Throughout the funeral rites, you heard muffled sobs escaping him from the distance where all the servants stood.

He wore every feeling openly upon himself, exactly the sort of person your brother would have loved too easily.

Now, without Renji remaining there to anchor him, Gen no longer seemed to possess a place within the estate at all.

His duties had ended alongside your brother's final breath.

Shuren came dangerously close to dismissing him.

Discussions had already begun regarding where the boy might be transferred once mourning concluded, perhaps toward one of the merchant residences connected to the estate or some lesser property requiring additional attendants.

Yet in the end, your father kept him.

At the time, Shuren likely convinced himself it stemmed from pity alone.

Gen had arrived at the manor through Renji's insistence, possessed no surviving family to return to, and had spent most of his life growing beneath your household's protection.

Casting him aside immediately after your brother's death would have appeared unnecessarily cruel.

Still, deep within yourself, you suspected another truth lingered beneath your father's decision.

Keeping Gen nearby felt similar to keeping a fragment of Renji alive.

By the end of the mourning week, you had scarcely left your chambers.

Meals arrived untouched more often than not, curtains remained drawn against the daylight, and every conversation directed toward you eventually dissolved into the same silence.

The manor had grown quieter after Renji's death, yet nowhere did that silence settle more heavily than within your rooms.

You had been seated upon the floor beside your bed when Gen arrived.

Suyin sat across from you, carefully folding fresh robes atop her lap while speaking softly about something you had not been listening to.

Your knees remained drawn toward your chest beneath layers of silk, your head resting tiredly against the side of the mattress while incense burned slowly nearby.

A quiet knock had come first.

Nari, being your newest maid, had been tasked to open the doors as she slowly learned the workings of your chambers.

She had done so swiftly, and Suyin's voice had stopped immediately at the sight of Gen.

You barely lifted your eyes toward the entrance before looking away once more.

Gen lingered near the doorway, uncertainly. He appeared younger than you remembered.

"My lady," he greeted quietly.

You offered no response to his words.

Suyin glanced between the two of you hesitantly before finally rising from the floor. "Would you like us to remain?"

"No." You muttered after several moments. "You may leave."

The maids obeyed immediately, though not before Lian cast Gen one final glance while passing him.

Then the doors closed.

Silence overtook your chambers yet again, while you waited for Gen to explain his arrival.

You expected condolences. Everyone else had arrived carrying them.

Servants spoke gently around you now, and attendants lowered their voices on instinct.

Your own father watched you with restrained concern that only seemed to worsen your grief further.

Every person entering your chambers treated you delicately so that even breathing around someone else felt irritating.

Gen did none of that. For a while, he simply remained standing there.

Then, without asking permission, he crossed the room and lowered himself onto the floor beside your bed, leaving a respectable distance between the two of you so that his shoulder never brushed yours.

He didn't give any comforting words, nor did he provide an apology.

He did not speak. He simply shared his presence.

You found yourself strangely grateful for it.

The room had remained quiet for so long that you eventually spoke first.

"You should leave. It is improper for you to be here."

Gen let out a tired breath that almost resembled a laugh.

"Lord Shuren seems to disagree."

"He sent for...you?" You asked skeptically.

From your peripheral, you had noticed him give you a nod as he explained—

"Lord Shuren is worried. At this time of need, you should be sharing your grief."

"And...he sent you to speak on his behalf, as opposed to greeting me himself?" You retorted.

"I do not know the reason for it."

"With my brother no longer in our lives, I suppose you should be leaving quite soon." You spoke harshly, your emotions bleeding through.

"Lord Shuren has asked me to remain."

You scoffed at him.

"How odd. My father must have confused his guilt for kindness."

The words slipped from you without thought.

Gen turned toward you immediately afterward, startled by the bluntness as you finally looked at him properly for the first time since he entered.

You understood then why your maids had whispered so worriedly about him as they left.

He looked dreadful.

There was no physical injury, nor was he ill, but he was hollowed of his usual presence.

Renji's death had stripped something essential from him; it had taken away the charm he had built from observing your brother all these years.

"You have not slept." You observed.

Neither accusation nor concern touched your voice. It was as if you were only stating a fact, which you were.

Gen stared ahead toward the darkened windows instead of answering immediately.

"I keep thinking I hear him calling for me."

Grief tightened within your chest because you understood him.

There had already been moments throughout the past week where your own body reacted instinctively to footsteps beyond your doors, foolishly expecting Renji's voice to follow afterward.

"He used to wake before sunrise whenever he had lessons with the palace tutors." Gen continued quietly. "Half the time he would oversleep anyway, then blame me for not waking him sooner."

Despite yourself, you almost smiled.

"That sounds like him."

"He once convinced the kitchen staff you had stolen sweet buns before dinner." A faint trace of warmth entered his voice for the first time. "You cried for nearly an hour after Lord Shuren scolded you."

Your expression flattened immediately.

"I had only been eight." You reminded him

"I do recall you threw one at his head afterward."

"He deserved it."

Gen laughed softly, and it might have been the first time you'd seen him do so in a long time.

The sound nearly ruined you, because it reminded you of the time Renji was still here.

The quiet of your room was still suffocating, though it no longer pressed quite so painfully against your ribs.

Then quietly you spoke again.

"I think...this sort of grief is terribly selfish."

Gen frowned slightly beside you as you continued staring ahead while speaking.

"We mourn because we can no longer endure someone's absence." Your fingers tightened around the fabric pooled around you.

"But the person who died no longer suffers anything at all."

The room grew still.

"My father grieves his son. The servants grieve the heir they adored. You grieve your...friend." Your voice softened gradually as you noticed Gen stiffen beside you.

"And I grieve the only person who ever understood me."

You swallowed once.

"But Renji himself is beyond all of this now, and it is so very cruel."

Then slowly, you turned your head toward Gen.

He was staring at you, and something unreadable crossed his expression, his grief momentarily overtaken by a kind of stunned stillness you did not notice then.

Perhaps that had been the first moment Gen truly saw you, not merely as Renji's younger sister or the Advisor Shuren's daughter.

And perhaps, though you hadn't realized it yet, that had also been the beginning of everything that would one day destroy you.

Your wrists burned from the restraints as they dug mercilessly into your skin, the chains stretched high enough above your head that even attempting to stand properly sent pain tearing through your shoulders.

Every movement had become exhausting long ago, though your panic still forced your body to keep struggling despite how useless it had proven.

You had fought him.

Spirits, you had fought him desperately.

The moment consciousness returned, and you realized your outer silks had been stripped away, leaving you in nothing but the thin inner robes clinging loosely against your body that barely reach your mid-thighs.

You had thrashed violently, nearly toppling both yourself and him onto the floor.

Your nails had scratched skin. Your kicks had landed at least twice. You had screamed loud enough for your throat to turn raw within minutes.

None of it had stopped him from forcing your wrists into chains, and now, the lonely room echoed with the aftermath of your panic.

"Why?" You shouted again, your voice cracking harshly while the chains rattled violently above you from another failed attempt to free yourself.

"Why would you do this?!"

The man standing several feet away remained silent, and his silence terrified you.

"You have served my family since childhood!" The words tumbled from you desperately now, tinged with fury but also disbelief at what had happened.

"My brother trusted you!" Your breathing turned uneven while tears blurred your vision from frustration that beat your fear.

"Say something!" You screamed.

The lantern resting near the wall flickered softly, illuminating only fragments of him at a time beneath the dim light.

Your voice broke entirely.

"Gen, please..."

He finally moved, his steps so quiet, you wouldn't even notice his presence with your eyes closed.

He closed the remaining distance between the two of you, almost cautiously now that you had finally stopped screaming.

Your breathing remained ragged as you grew fearful of his approach, though you forced yourself to hold his stare regardless, refusing to let him see how badly your body had begun shaking.

Then his hand lifted toward your face, the touch unbearably gentle.

His knuckles brushed lightly against your cheek, pushing away strands of disheveled hair clinging damply against your skin, while something disturbingly tender softened within his expression.

"Renji worried about you endlessly, you know." He murmured.

"Even when he was ill, he spoke of your future more than his own. But then again...I'm sure he knew he didn't have a future to look forward to."

Revulsion twisted violently inside your chest, and you jerked your face away from him immediately.

"I spent...years listening to Renji talk about you. Speak of the woman you would become. And I have watched you become so beautiful. He would have been so proud."

"What are you doing?" You whispered sharply.

Gen watched you quietly for a moment before reluctantly lowering his hand.

"I feared..." His voice faltered slightly, almost sounding regretful, and a part of you almost pitied him, but your glare remained, waiting for him to continue.

"I feared I may never receive another opportunity to be alone with you again."

Your stomach turned.

"I thought perhaps you had noticed." His words came quieter.

You continued staring at him with wide eyes, unsure of what he meant. What were you meant to notice?

Perhaps there had been moments over the years that now returned differently beneath this nightmare.

His lingering stares were dismissed, or his small gestures were mistaken for harmless loyalty.

You swallowed hard against the rising panic threatening your throat.

"Gen..." His name came weaker this time. "Please let me go."

Something flickered across his face at hearing you plead.

"I only wished to be with you once before I leave..." He confessed softly.

Your brows pulled together immediately, yet you remained quiet.

"You are not even curious where I intend to go?" A humorless breath escaped him at your silence, and you only stared at him in horror.

"Let me go." The words left you low and trembling, though the command beneath them was difficult for Gen to ignore, and it only made him step closer.

Your pulse hammered the moment his hands settled carefully against your waist, drawing your body toward him despite the chains forcing your arms painfully overhead.

The contact alone made panic surge through you all over again as he buried his face against your neck.

For one terrible second, your body froze entirely in shock, and you stopped breathing altogether when his mouth brushed against your skin.

The moment his tongue dragged across your neck, revulsion snapped through you as a cry tore from your throat.

"Gen, stop!"

You struggled against him immediately, twisting desperately within his hold while the chains rattled harshly above you.

Your knees struck against his legs twice in blind panic, though he barely reacted beyond tightening his grip further around your waist.

"Please." He whispered against your skin, almost frantically now. "Please, just—"

"Stop!" Your voice cracked entirely this time.

You tried forcing yourself away from him again, using whatever leverage your restrained body could manage, though the movement only seemed to agitate something inside him.

The moment happened instantly, his hands seized you harder before he shoved you violently backward against the wall.

Pain exploded across your back from the impact, forcing the breath from your lungs so suddenly that no sound escaped you except a broken gasp.

"Do not make me hurt you!" He shouted.

The sound echoed through the abandoned room harshly enough to stun even himself as horror crossed his face.

"Oh..." His voice seemed to collapse into itself, morphing into one of regret. "Oh spirits..."

Your tears only worsened.

Gen reached for you again instantly, his hands trembling now while wiping desperately at the tears spilling down your cheeks.

"Please do not cry." He whispered frantically.

"Please understand..."

Yet you only sobbed harder, turning your face away from him while another desperate attempt to pull free from the chains tore painfully through your arms.

"I know I cannot have you, I know what I am beside someone like you." His forehead lowered briefly against your shoulder.

"I know I stand beneath you." He murmured shakily.

His words sounded almost ashamed.

"But just let me have this." He whispered.

"Just once."

His hands were frantic, a desperate worship that was only a violation with every passing second.

He pressed his face back into the crook of your neck, his lips leaving a trail of stinging bruises against your skin.

He was marking you where he had no right to touch, his breath hitching every time he momentarily detached himself.

You could only sob, the sound catching in your throat as your chest heaved with the effort to breathe.

You felt trapped between the unfeeling stone of the wall and the overwhelming weight of a man who had once been a fixture of your brother's safety, now turned into the source of your terror.

"Please..." He whimpered against your frantic pulse, his voice breaking.

"Please, let me..."

His fingers, trembling and clumsy, drifted from your waist.

You felt the sudden, cool rush of air as he caught the neckline of your inner robe, and with a sharp, tugging motion, he pulled the silk downward, baring your chest to the dim light of the lantern.

The exposure felt revolting, leaving you feeling utterly defenseless. As he shifted his weight, moving his focus from your neck to the trembling expanse of your skin, a fresh wave of abhorrence crashed over you.

You squeezed your eyes shut, a broken cry escaping your lips, but he only leaned in closer, lost in the desperate delusion of his own longing.

You felt the damp, stinging traces of his mouth and saliva as he moved lower.

Then, a new touch made your stomach lurch, the friction of him against your outer thigh.

The realization of what he was doing to himself, right there in the shadow of your misery, made you nauseous, your throat constricting in a silent battle against the repulsion.

"Gen, please... stop!" You begged, barely recognizing your own voice.

You tried to recoil, to shrink away from his touch, but his arms tightened like iron bands around your waist.

He pulled you flush against him, his body moving in a desperate motion against your leg while his mouth remained anchored to your skin.

You were drowning in the terror of the jarring notion of his pleasure clashing with your frantic, sobbing pleas.

Suddenly, he pulled away from your chest. You gasped, expecting a reprieve, but instead, he brought his face level with yours.

He pressed his nose against your cheek, his skin damp with your tears, as he continued to thrust against your thigh.

"No! Stop! Please! No!" Your cries broke, dissolving into thin sobs.

He offered no answer but a low grunt.

A moment later, a sudden warmth spilled down your thigh, the viscous evidence of his release that felt like a brand of shame upon your skin.

"No!" You wailed in a desperate attempt to move away.

To your shock, he suddenly loosened his grip as you slumped back as far as the chains would allow, hunching your shoulders as you sobbed, your entire body trembling with the aftershock of the violation.

Gen stared at you, his expression a mask of dazed horror. He moved to adjust himself, his eyes brimming with tears that began to spill down his own face.

He reached out, his hands trembling as he cupped your face with a tenderness that only felt like a second assault.

"No, please...do not hate..."

"Don't touch me!" The scream ripped from your throat, fueled by a sudden rage.

You lunged forward, your forehead striking the bridge of his nose with a sickening thud.

He recoiled, falling back onto the floor, dazed from the impact as you continued to sob.

As he looked up, his gaze drifted down to your leg, where the damp evidence of his desire remained.

A fresh wave of panic and regret seized him as he scrambled toward you, his hands frantic as he began to wipe at your skin with his sleeves, his voice a broken litany of apologies.

"I'm sorry... I'm so sorry! Please, forgive me!"

You thrashed against him as you kicked out, trying to ward off his touch, but he barely recoiled, not leaving you till you had been wiped clean.

For several unbearable moments, he remained kneeling before you, looking utterly ruined by what he himself had done, his hands trembling faintly while he struggled to form words that no longer held meaning.

The apology leaving him sounded broken, though it did nothing to lessen the horror crawling beneath your skin.

You refused to look at him.

Even after everything, part of you still recognized his voice too well, and that wounded more deeply than the violence itself.

Eventually, the floorboards creaked softly beneath his retreating steps.

Moments later came the sound of movement outside the abandoned house, followed by the restless cries of one of the ostrich-horses.

Then you heard the sound of leather pulling, as a whip sounded through the air.

Your entire body tensed instinctively.

A second later, the galloping began.

The sound echoed loudly before gradually growing fainter and fainter until the only thing that remained were the cries of the other ostrich horse Gen had left behind.

Time lost meaning afterward.

Your shoulders had long since become numb from the strain of your wrists being forced overhead, though every slight movement still sent pain tearing sharply through your arms.

The thin inner robes barely covered you now, clinging unevenly against your body while the evening cold gradually settled deeper into the abandoned shack.

At some point, the sunlight disappeared entirely.

You only realized it once the dim orange glow leaking through the broken windows slowly faded into blue darkness instead.

You could not sit. You could not lower yourself.

The chains kept you upright, no matter how terrifying exhaustion dragged at your body, leaving you standing helplessly against the wall while dried tears tightened painfully across your cheeks.

Finally, the door slammed open hard enough to strike against the wall. Your nerves jumped at the sound, but your eyes lifted to fall upon the intruder.

"Aang?" Your voice came out broken.

Aang barely heard you.

His chest heaved sharply from exertion, every thought inside him dissolving the moment he saw you chained against the wall.

He simply froze for a horrible second, then his attention darted wildly across the room, searching corners, broken windows, doorways, any sign that someone else remained nearby.

But it was only you in the trembling state you had been left in.

Hours earlier, the moment he realized both you and Gen had vanished alongside the ostrich-horses, panic had consumed him so completely.

He searched the roads surrounding the abandoned carriage desperately at first, convincing himself there had to be some reasonable explanation hidden beneath the growing dread clawing through his chest.

First, he noticed the tracks.

The deep clawed impressions left behind by the ostrich-horses cut clearly through the dirt roads surrounding the marketplace outskirts.

He felt relieved, since it gave him a trail to follow. But the relief was shattered upon realizing that the trail curved directly back into the merchant district.

The further he followed, the worse it became.

Thousands of footprints destroyed the tracks beyond recognition, merchants and travelers having trampled every visible path into useless chaos.

The ostrich-horse tracks vanished beneath overlapping footprints and wagon trails until the streets themselves had become impossible to tell apart.

Still, he refused to stop.

He searched alleyways first, then rooftops.

Then every narrowing road stretched farther from the center of the district, while shouting your name until his throat burned raw from it.

Several times, he propelled himself upward using bursts of air beneath his feet, landing on the roofs just to search farther ahead through the streets.

Still, he saw nothing.

He wished desperately for Toph then.

She would have sensed the vibrations through the earth instantly. She would have followed footsteps, recognized all the movement, and would have found you in no time.

Aang had no such skill.

Only instinct is driving him harder with every passing minute.

His glider would've helped a lot, and it only frustrated him, remembering that he had left the staff within the carriage earlier that afternoon, only for it to disappear alongside everything else.

So he kept searching on foot instead.

Using air bending wherever possible, while the merchant district slowly began thinning around him. The deeper outward he traveled, the quieter the streets became until eventually the endless noise of the marketplace faded behind him almost entirely.

Then finally, the tracks continued.

Two ostrich-horses.

Unlike the ruined marketplace roads, the dirt surrounding the outskirts remained mostly untouched, leaving the clawed impressions visible enough for him to follow clearly beneath the dimming evening light.

Aang had run the entire way afterward.

And at the very edge of the district, standing isolated beside overgrown vines and abandoned structures, he found the small rotting house with one lone ostrich-horse tied outside waiting restlessly beside it.

The sight of Aang standing there struck something through you.

You jerked violently against the wall, twisting away from the doorway while what remained of your thin inner robe slipped further down your chest from the abrupt movement.

A broken sound escaped you instantly as you tried desperately to cover yourself despite your wrists still being chained, your shoulders straining painfully from the effort.

"Aang—"

Your voice barely resembled your own anymore, and Aang stopped breathing for a moment.

Shock rooted him to the doorway while the reality before him settled in, horribly, piece by piece.

From the bruises scattered across your skin to the state of your robes.

Then his eyes snapped away immediately realizing how exposed you had been left.

He turned his head sharply toward the dark corners of the room instead, searching every inch of the abandoned house with frantic urgency while his hands curled tightly at his sides.

"Is—" His voice came out rough from how hard he had been breathing.

He swallowed hard before trying again. "Is anyone else here?"

You could not answer properly as your throat closed painfully around the words before they could form, so instead you shook your head weakly, softly pivoting yourself to hide your front.

He saw from his peripheral vision your notion of disagreement.

Aang stayed completely still, waiting carefully despite the pounding of his own pulse drowning half his thoughts out.

The abandoned house remained silent except for your uneven breathing and the faint rattling of chains whenever you shifted your exhausted body.

Then he finally moved further into the room.

Aang moved toward you with caution, every step measured carefully to avoid startling you while he kept his attention deliberately fixed anywhere but your exposed skin.

Even with his precaution, you flinched when the wood creaked beneath his feet.

The reaction made him stop in his place.

"It's alright." He said quietly, though the reassurance sounded strained as the horror seemed to be tightening his throat.

"I'm going to help you down."

You only gave a nod, refusing to speak yet again.

Still, Aang stopped himself several feet away from you.

"Can I come closer?" He asked softly.

The question nearly broke you all over again.

The hours spent pleading had taught your body that words no longer mattered, that resistance only invited harsher force. So Aang standing there waiting for permission merely to approach you comforted you.

Your lips parted faintly before the smallest nod finally answered him.

Only then did Aang step closer to you.

The chains binding your wrists had been secured into the wall through thick iron hooks corroded heavily with age, rust flaking visibly along the weakened metal.

Aang studied them briefly before lifting one hand carefully toward the restraints, his movements slow enough not to frighten you further.

A narrow current of air gathered around his fingers first, then it sharpened.

The pressure twisted against the rusted metal until a sharp crack split through the room, the first restraint snapping apart beneath his fingers.

Your arm dropped instantly from exhaustion.

Aang caught your wrist before it could strike painfully against the wall.

The second chain shattered moments later beneath another precise burst of air.

The moment both restraints released entirely, your knees nearly buckled beneath you from the sudden loss of support, but you held yourself up by leaning against the wall.

You moved weakly while your shaking hands rushed desperately toward the neckline of your robe, dragging the thin fabric back across your chest as your arms shivered from strain.

Aang looked away again as you adjusted your clothing, not wishing to invade.

Even so, the marks covering your skin had already burned themselves permanently into his mind.

Dark bruises spread across your throat and collarbones, while others disappeared beneath the loosened fabric clutched to your chest.

The sight alone made remorse twist sharply through him.

"Do you..." His voice faltered briefly before he forced the question out anyway.

"Do you know who took you?"

The words shattered whatever fragile composure you had left.

Your fingers tightened weakly around the hem of your robes while another sob tore from your throat, your body curling inward instinctively as though trying desperately to make yourself smaller.

Then you nodded.

Aang felt his chest tighten immediately.

"It was Gen..." Your voice cracked beyond recognition.

The confession left your lips, and with it, your strength seemed to vanish entirely.

Your knees finally gave out beneath you as you collapsed onto the floorboards, your arms wrapping tightly around yourself while sobs ripped uncontrollably through your chest.

The sound filled the abandoned shack, solemn and raw.

Aang stood motionless because he genuinely did not know how to help you.

Nothing had ever prepared him for this kind of pain.

He had witnessed destruction before. He had seen entire villages burned beneath war, he had watched people grieve unimaginable loss, and he had carried the weight of deaths he could never undo, no matter how desperately he wished otherwise.

Yet this felt horrifying in a way that left him stumped.

There had been nothing accidental about this. It was cruelty inflicted upon someone who had trusted too easily and had suffered because of it.

Quietly, Aang removed the red robes resting over his shoulders before lowering himself carefully beside you onto the floorboards. Without drawing attention to the movement itself, he draped the fabric gently around your body until your skin disappeared beneath the warmth of the robes.

You reacted only by clutching the material tighter.

Your sobbing continued, each breath sounding painful enough that Aang feared you might stop breathing altogether if the grief tightened any harder inside your chest.

Tears streamed endlessly down your face while your body curled inward beneath the robes, and Aang did not know what words could reach you now.

So he chose to remain silent. He remained beside you quietly on the floor while your crying slowly unraveled, giving you the only thing he still could.

His presence.

It took time before your crying weakened enough for your body to stop shaking.

Your limbs felt weak, and your breathing was uneven as you sat on the floorboards for a long time, clutching desperately at the fabric covering you while humiliation and grief burned you, making it impossible to even lift your head.

Aang stayed quiet through all of it. He waited until your sobbing quieted into strained breaths before carefully placing his hands against your shoulders, making sure to be gentle so as not to frighten you.

"We should get you home." He said softly.

Your throat tightened painfully at the words.

Home.

The thought alone nearly threatened another wave of tears, though exhaustion had already drained too much from you to cry properly anymore. You managed a nod as you attempted to force yourself onto your feet.

The effort failed immediately.

Pain shot sharply through your legs the moment you stood, your body swaying, and you would have collapsed back onto the floor had Aang not caught you first.

Embarrassment flooded viciously beneath your skin at how helpless you felt, though whatever pride once lived inside you had already been shattered hours ago within this house.

Aang steadied you carefully, one hand firm against your shoulder while the other hovered nearby, prepared to catch you again should your strength fail before reaching the door.

He moved slowly for your sake, matching the uneven pace of your weakened steps while guiding you out of the abandoned house and back into the night air beyond it.

Cold struck your skin, and you instinctively pulled the robes tighter around yourself while the overgrown dirt paths surrounding the house stretched endlessly beneath the moonlight.

The remaining ostrich-horse shifted restlessly against the ground where it had been tied outside hours earlier, its low cries blending with the distant sounds of wind passing through neglected trees.

The world had grown colder during the hours you remained trapped inside, and the quiet surrounding the outskirts eventually broke beneath the distant sound of movement approaching from somewhere ahead.

At first, the noise remained faint enough that you nearly ignored it, though within moments it sharpened into the unmistakable sound of galloping of several ostrich-horses alongside carriage wheels cutting harshly against uneven earth.

Distant voices followed, accompanied by flickering torchlight emerging through the darkness as panic seized through your muscles.

Your entire body stiffened beside Aang.

For one terrifying moment, fear convinced you Gen had returned.

Your breathing caught painfully in your throat, though the torchlight appearing beyond the road moments later halted the panic before it could fully consume you.

Several carriages emerged through the darkness, accompanied by armed guards riding alongside them, the flames illuminating flashes of metal and embroidered banners while the entire procession advanced rapidly toward the outskirts.

Relief struck you so suddenly, your knees nearly buckled beneath you.

You recognized your father's crest first upon the leading carriage, visible beneath the torchlight, making you exhale at the sight of something familiar at last.

Another carriage followed close behind, bearing the royal insignia worked carefully into dark banners shifting against the wind.

Prince Jinhai had come as well.

The moment the leading carriage came to a halt, your father descended from it immediately.

Relief hit you at the sight of him, and tears burned fresh behind your eyes before you could stop them.

For one foolish moment, you truly believed everything would finally be alright now that he had found you.

"Father—"

You barely managed the word before he reached you.

His hand seized your shoulder harshly enough to make you flinch, the force behind it startling after the fragile gentleness Aang had shown you moments earlier.

"What were you thinking?!" He shouted.

The fury in his voice stunned you completely.

Several guards lowered their heads instantly at the outburst as they shifted uneasily beside the carriages. Whether it was the exposed sight of you or watching their Lord lose composure, you didn't know.

You stared at him in disbelief.

Your stomach dropped as confusion collided with the fragile relief you had only just begun to grasp.

You understood he must have been worried.

Spirits, you understood that much.

"I-I am sorry, father—"

Before you could finish, his grip tightened further around your shoulder before he pulled you forcefully aside, dragging you several steps away from Aang and the others waiting nearby.

The sudden movement nearly caused you to stumble outright, your exhausted body barely capable of keeping pace while your father continued holding you hard enough that fear crept over your confusion.

"Do you possess any understanding whatsoever of what you have done?" He hissed beneath his breath.

You blinked at him weakly.

"I...what?"

"I understand your interest in the Avatar..." He continued sharply, struggling to keep his voice lowered despite the fury visibly consuming him, "But could you truly not have exercised restraint for a single evening?! Prince Jinhai himself was present within the manor."

The words struck you so abruptly that your mind failed to understand them at first.

You simply stared at him.

And your father mistook your silence for shame.

"You disappear for hours alongside the Avatar," he continued, his grip still painfully firm against your shoulder.

"Then Gen returns alone speaking of such...impropriety! Spirits! They were severe enough that he feared scandal would follow should he remain silent. I refused to believe him. But what precisely am I meant to conclude now upon finding you half-undressed within an abandoned house beside another man?"

The world around you seemed to tilt violently.

You could barely breathe.

Your lips parted, yet no sound emerged while a new horror unfurled inside you, so immense it threatened to swallow every terror that had come before it.

He thought—

Spirits.

He thought you had chosen this.

"I have spent your entire life ensuring you would possess everything a woman in your position could ever require!" Your father continued, each word edged with barely contained fury.

"A future beside the crown prince, a place within the royal palace, security, influence, dignity—everything has been prepared carefully for you since the day you were born!"

From the corner of your vision, you noticed Prince Jinhai approaching Aang several paces away, the guards lingering uneasily between them while the Avatar still stood near the house with visible bewilderment and concern written plainly across his face.

Meanwhile, your father leaned closer toward you, lowering his voice further.

"And yet your impatience," he hissed, "and your wanton promiscuity may very well have destroyed everything."

The words struck you harshly, making you freeze completely.

For several seconds, you could only stare at him in disbelief while the meaning behind his accusation settled horrifically in your mind.

"What..." Your voice cracked. "What do you mean?"

Your father's expression darkened further.

"Gen has spoken of everything."

chapter ten coming soon...

a/n: i know this chapter probably raised about ten new questions while answering absolutely none of the old ones, but i promise there are answers for all of them, even if some of them won't be revealed for a while.

we're also finally nearing the end of this flashback section. and i will confirm that we will have another flashback segment later in the story.

but first...we have some zuko-related business to attend to. and by business, i mean drama. a concerning amount of drama.

masterlist

Now it had been 10 years since he’d seen her, and 6 years since his coup had succeeded and the ministry was under his control now, the wizarding world was under his feet.

His long-laid plans had come to fruition and paid off. He’d taken risks to get here, trusted those who might betray if a better deal came along, enlisted those who might have second thoughts.

But it had worked out, he had an army of his own, born from his school gang, now the Death Eaters. They had seamlessly overtaken the magical and muggle governments in mere weeks, dismantling everything built over the last couple hundred years.

But, Tom surmised, fingers brushing over another file full of paperwork, if it was that easy to destroy, then it hadn’t been well built in the first place. A thought he’d had since he was young, and saw the corruption seeded within the ministry, the evil that pooled in the muggles, the wars, the cruelty, the pure hate that bled back and forth over centuries.

He put a stop to it. Within a mere six years, he’d put an end to it. The law of secrecy had been tightly wound with fear, fear from witch hunts, but Muggle’s, Tom knew, were smarter nowadays, even fascinated with Magic. Not all of them, however, that he knew as well, having met so many in his childhood that feared him, feared him to be a demon because of things they couldn’t explain.

So, Tom planned carefully, for even longer than a mere 12 years, 15 even, to one day break the shackles wizard kind had placed themselves in and free them all. Many didn’t see it that way, of course not-with that little rebellion that had built up over the last few years, having no official name, but a threat all the same.

Tom saw freedom in magic unchained, choices unchained, people unchained. And yet, his hatred from years of childhood abuse came bubbling, and-to feed his army of death eaters (some of whom had taken the choice to become immortal like him, to become vampires), He allowed those unworthy of magic to become the bottom of the food chain.

Blood bags, they were called now, simple, but effective in the name. Humans, be them muggles or muggleborns, sometimes half-bloods that were stupid enough to get caught, and the even rarer pureblood that stood against him; were taken and starved into deficiency, but kept strong enough for their blood to keep flowing.

Vampires who could afford it, to afford their own personal living blood bags, bought and feasted on these humans, sometimes more; sometimes a pet, sometimes a pretty face to keep around and fuck, maybe breed if need be, or wanted.

Tom hadn’t done any of that yet. He found himself rarely drinking human blood, he found it disgusting almost, no one’s blood was good enough for him to drink, no ones blood was pure enough for the dark lord, for the vampire king-Voldemort.

He shuddered at the thought of his own name, one he’d built for himself since the school years, a name once only whispered between him and his knights, now echoed across the world, feared. Reveared.

Tom stood from his desk, trailing his fingers-his nails permanently black, sharp when he needed-across the dark mahogany of his desk, approaching the large window that looked over the ministry of magic.

A slow, curling, smile grew on his lips, looking down at his subjects. Wizards, witches, dark creatures, and his Death Eaters, who took arrested Muggles from snatchers and dragged them off to the prisons, to either be sold to the supply warehouses or just be killed, or petrified and become another example.

All to strengthen what was left of wizarding kind, to overcome the fear of extinction. Now they were on top again, now, Muggles would not fear them because they didn’t understand, Muggles would fear because they were prey.

And he, the predator.

The King.

Just as he’d always wanted.

He turned away from the window, approaching his desk again and taking the goblet that sat on a thick coaster. He lifted it to his lips, swallowing a iron rich mouthful of pig’s blood, perfectly mixed with a shot of fire whisky to thin it out. Tom lowered the goblet, licking his stained lips, pressing his tongue to his fanged canine as a knock came from his office door.

“Enter,” He said cooly, setting down the goblet and sitting at his office, steepling his fingers together.

Abraxas Malfoy, a loyal friend-older than him and one of his first followers, entered the room, his silvery-blonde hair in a long braid, cloaked in his family colors, a serpentine cane in hand. “Abraxas,” Tom greeted, warmer-toned now. Abraxas smiled back, unclipping his cloak and hanging it from the coat rack by Tom’s office door.

Tom poured Abraxas a regular glass of whisky, as Abraxas was not a vampire, far too prideful in his bloodline and humanity to do so, but Tom did not complain. If everyone were immortal like he, what would be special about him anymore?

“What brings you around this time?” Tom asked, handing Abraxas the glass-who took it with a grateful nod and a toast-before sitting back down at his desk. “Another resistance dispute? Muggles causing chaos? Perhaps an heir for your Malfoy throne?”

Abraxas’ cheeks turned pink, and he shook his head with a grin. “No, no, none of that. The resistance is quiet, they had quite the loss of members four months back, they’re licking their wounds. The muggles are being smart, laying low, and unfortunately no, not yet.” Tom smirked behind his goblet, licking his lips, stained with red, as he lowered it.

“Then what brings you here? Gossip?” Tom drawled, raising his brow as Abraxas took a breath and the look on his face became more serious. “What?” Tom asked, setting down his goblet at the end of his desk.

“She’s finally appeared in the system,” Abraxas said quietly, and Tom sat up, quickly, his goblet knocked to the floor in his haste-his red eyes locked onto Abraxas.

“Do not take me for a fool, Malfoy.” Tom said, quietly, threatening. If Abraxas was lying, getting his hopes up…

He’d searched for her relentlessly for 10 years, following trails of her scent, echoes of her voice, the ache of his heart that did not beat properly anymore.

She’d disappeared from him as soon as they’d departed from Kings cross, as if she had the fidelius charm on her-he could not find her, not through any means. It had ached to lose her for so long; her very essence haunted his days, his dreams, his nights.

But now-

“I can assure you, Tom, I would not lie to you about her. She was apart of the resistance,” Tom scoffed a little, of course she was. “and was a part of the group captured four months ago, according to my sources. She’s been within Derlic Sevar’s warehouse for months, yet to be sold.”

Tom swallowed hard, jaw working-panic spiking. She was alive, but would not be well. Derlic was a bottom rung blood bag seller, a werewolf (which Tom didn’t care about that part) who treated his stock terribly, especially when they first came in, to break them to nothing so they wouldn’t fight back against whoever bought them.

Tom stood, knocking his chair back, grabbing his coat from the ground-it had been resting on his chair-and putting it on. “Address.” Tom seethed, slipping on a silver half-face snake/skull mask, his eyes gleaming beneath it.

Abraxas told him, and Tom was gone.

It was night, the air clear and crisp. Tom’s breath fogged as he stalked towards the dimly lit warehouse, he could hear the humans within, their bodies pumping blood steadily through, their breath faint.

Derlic must’ve heard him coming, like a dog, because he came out of the warehouse, greeting Tom with a sharp grin-not knowing it was the dark lord, on account of Tom’s mask and his hood. Right now, he was just a run-of-the-mill vampire, looking for cheap food.

“What brings you here my friend?” Derlic greeted, searching Tom’s person with just his eyes, angling for a wand, or a bag of galleons. He was a fat werewolf, with protruding canines, rust colored hair, and yellow eyes; wearing a suit that told of his high living class, but the musty smell off him told otherwise.

“Food. A girl.” Tom said, keeping his voice low and even, gleaming red eyes staring past Derlic into the warehouse. There were at least 50 people in there, one of which was her.

She just had to be here, she had to. Abraxas would not lie to him, or give him late or false information.

“We have plenty of those,” Derlic laughs, waving Tom to follow, before pausing. “Oh, but first, as a precaution to first time buyers, a down payment,” Derlic said, grinning, and Tom curls his lip a little as Derlic holds out his grimy hand.

Finding her was the top priority, he didn’t care how he had to do it.

He pulled out his wallet and dropped several galleons into Derlic’s palm, whose yellow eyes widened with delight, before guiding Tom towards the warehouse, where Derlic’s right-hand man, another werewolf named Airle, opened the doors-which swung open heavily, creaking against the metal walls and frames.

Tom stepped inside, and was greeted by rows and rows of large metal dog kennels. His red eyes scanned them relentlessly, looking for those familiar eyes, walking slowly down the middle aisle as Derlic prattled on about his selection.

Where was she, where was she, where was she, where was she?

His eyes grazed past a woman, who was frail and under heavy drugs, but he didn’t continue-his eyes snapped back to her, and he stopped.

There she was, his (y/n).

His barely beating heart thumped rapidly in his chest. He felt alive again, colors edging in his vision as he took in her terribly hurt frame. She was so skinny-drug skinny, her cheeks sunken, lips cracked and bloody, eyes wide and blood-shot; though it looked as if she was having trouble keeping them open.

And she wore nothing but her underwear, which was dirty and stained.

(y/n). my (y/n), my beloved, my soul.

He wanted to tear the metal off her cage and free her then and there, escape this place with her, and nurse her back to health until she was okay again.

She was staring at him, she recognized him-he could tell, she knew his eyes, even if they were different now, and she was asking-yearning-screaming-for him to help her.

“And this one?” He asks Derlic-who pauses in his own rambling-his own voice sounds so far away; even to himself, but he just keeps his eyes on (y/n).

If he looked away, she’d disappear, just like last time.

Derlic kicks her cage and she closes her eyes in pain-Tom’s fist instantly clenched, the bones creaking with tight pressure. His growing claws dig into his palm, blood slowly seeping out.

“That one’s been here about five months,” Derlic said, talking about (y/n) as if she was just an animal in a shelter. Anger, no rage, boiled in Tom’s chest, bubbling up like acid in his throat. “Half-blood, still got some meat on her, but it’s burning out quick,” Derlic laughs, a sound that has Tom’s knuckles popping as he clenches his fist even tighter-black blood drops to the floor.

“Reckon she’d make a fun fuck toy too, if that's what you’re interested in-“ Tom turns-eyes gleaming bright red with pure anger now, he grabs Derlic’s throat, cutting his disgusting sentence off, lifting the fat werewolf off the ground. Tom doesn’t say a word as Derlic panics; his breathing strained beneath Tom’s grasp as he squeezes hard.

“Please-don’t-“ Derlic begs, yellow eyes bulging. Tom snarls, baring his fangs. He lifts up one hand-claws at the ready-and spears it into the base of Derlic’s neck, pushing as blood spurts and spills down.

Airle screams, scrambling away-as Tom splits Derlic’s head away from his shoulders, pulling two ways with each hand until the head pops off, blood spurting across Tom’s face, the spine pulls out-held together by nerves and muscles before a vertebrae snaps apart-the body falls with a wet thud.

Tom stares, watching the light leave Derlic’s eyes. He turns, finding a hook-he doesn’t even bother to think what it’s used for, and stabs Derlic’s head onto it, blood dripping down onto the top of a cage, creating a small pool of blood.

Tom turns to Airle, who stares in pure horror, shaking his knees together as he scoots back against a cage. “Please-i-I won’t-just take her-take her!” Airle begs, and Tom curls his lip in disgust at the werewolf’s cowardice.

“You’ve been promoted.” Tom drawls, his claws retreating as his anger cools. “Don’t be foolish as this dog was.” Tom hisses, jutting his head back towards the dead Derlic. Airle nods frantically, still shaking as he hands Tom the cage keys once demanded.

Tom nearly ripped open the lock and the door, the metal bending under the force of his grip. Airle tries to help-thinking foolishly to grab (y/n)’s collar chain and yank her out like she was a dog. Tom snatched the werewolf’s hand and crushes it instantly, his eyes remaining on (y/n) as she watches with nothing but a blank stare.

Oh my love, what did they do to you?

No matter. He’d make sure she’d get that spark back.

He gently pulled her out-wrapping his arms beneath her and backing up once he had her. He unclips his cloak-wrapping it around her, making sure she was covered up and warm. She was utterly filthy, her hair a mess of mats and tangles. His poor girl.

He demands what drugs she’d been put on-Airle shakily hands him a schedule and even tries to give him the drugs themselves to keep drugging (y/n) but Tom kicks him into a cage, turning and stalking back out of the warehouse, (y/n) tucked safely in his arms.

He could feel her breathing against his neck, weak and slow.

He has her.

He has her.

She’s safe.

She’s safe.

His teeth felt moments from cracking as he stared at the drug schedule those in charge of the blood bag stock used.

Oxycodone multiple times a day, to keep her drowsy and down, he’d absolutely need to clean her system of that as soon as possible, it was going to be the toughest drug for her to get clean of, that one was addictive. Rohypnol once a day, in the late night to keep her unconscious during cleaning in the morning, something else he’d have to monitor for as the drugs left her system. And Barbiturates, to sedate her even further.

Tom sighed, pressing his hands to his face, taking several deep breaths.

His girl, his poor girl.

He should’ve found her sooner, he should’ve found her when she was apart of that foolish resistance and saved her then-protected her from even being captured by the human trafficking ring.

He stands abruptly as he hears (y/n) scream from within the bathroom he’d had his female servants to get her all cleaned up-he can hear her heart beating too fast-to quick. He ran, slamming into his door frame-cracking the wood-racing down the corridor to the bedroom.

He slams open the doors, watching as (y/n) screamed and panicked, writhing and hyperventilating.

One of the two servants stuns her, the other sticks a needle with basic sedation-Tom had told them to only use such tactics if absolutely needed, but it is still not pleasant to see her drugged again. His chest aches as he watches (y/n) go limp, her glassy eyes, full of falling tears, meet his. And she passes out.

“Out.” Tom snarls, and the two servants scramble and run past him.

He slowly steps forward, before sinking to his knees beside the tub, the ivory stark even against her pale-almost clean-skin. Her face is sunken, tears on her barely flushed cheeks, wet lashes fluttering as she breathes faintly.

“I’m sorry,” Tom whispers, reaching up to hold her face, caressing his thumb across her cheek. A small smile grows as she leaned into his touch. Even asleep, even 12 years later, she still knows his touch.

He gently picked up a comb and rolled up his sleeves, sitting there for the next hour as he slowly combed out the tangles and mats, and then a sponge, gently cleaning off her body the rest of the way.

His fingers trail her spine, each notch visible, and he swallows down a whisper of her name, pulling her against him so he could wash her back, not caring if she got his suit vest wet.

Soon, she was clean, her hair combed through. He tossed the collected broken hair into the trash, draining the tub and wrapping her in a charmed warm towel, carrying her into the bedroom-which was grand, facing the garden that was illuminated by the sun in the morning. She liked gardens, had since they were young.

He looked out the window, looking down into the moon-lit garden.

“Mr. Fields,” Tom called for his personal hand, who came walking in with no rush. “Have the gardeners plant some new flowers, hydrangeas, pink roses, lavender; make sure they can be viewed from this window.”

Mr. Fields nods and bows out, his tailcoat whipping behind him as he turns and leaves the room. Tom lay (y/n) down on the grand four-poster bed, which had been stripped and re-dressed in (y/n)’s preferred colors upon her arrival.

He gently dried her body, drawing a hand down her side. Her ribs were prominent now. He swallowed hard, throat aching.

He’d make sure she’d get better. He’d help her through withdrawal and help her regain her weight.

She would be better. He’d help her.

He orders a servant nearby to bring a shirt of his and a pair of his shorts, and his heart aches as he dresses her in the very same style of clothes she used to wear when sleeping in his dorm room 12 years ago.

He kisses her forehead, between her brows, and tucks her in.

He knew things from here would be tough, from withdrawal to recovery, but he wouldn’t leave her again.

He wouldn’t let her run away again.

-end of p3-

the first letter was written with tears blurring the ink, your hand trembling so violently the words were nearly illegible. it was a litany of grief and fury, a desperate plea to a sleeping god.

they have taken you. taken you from me. your father calls it a punishment, a cure. i call it a cruelty that eclipses even your own. i will write every day, aerion. i will fill the narrow sea with my words until they carry you home to me. do not let lys make you forget.

the ship sailed on the morning tide. you watched from the highest tower of maegor’s holdfast, a small, stone figure against the grey sky, until the speck of his ship vanished into the mist. the red keep felt like a tomb.

for weeks, the letters were your lifeblood. you wrote of the stifling silence of your chambers, of the cold politeness of the court. you wrote of your dreams, always of him, of his sharp, cruel smile and the surprising gentleness of his hands when he thought you were asleep. you poured all the love you had into those scrolls.

the first replies came, carried by raven, his familiar, sharp script a balm to your soul.

they were short, always. lys is a cesspit of perfumed lies. the wine is watered. the women are tiresome. i think of you.

it was enough. it was a thread connecting you across the sea, proof that the man you had painstakingly uncovered was still there, buried beneath the weight of his exile.

but the sea was vast, and lys was a paradise built to ensnare the senses. you knew what your husband was like. you knew the allure of easy pleasure, the thrill of a fight in a pleasure house, the ego-stroking adoration of courtesans who saw only a prince’s purse and not the fractured soul beneath. it was an inevitable current, and you feared he was a man who could not resist it.

the replies grew shorter. the heat is oppressive. then they grew longer, but the content changed.

i won a duel today. a braavosi with more coin than sense. he cried like a child.

he spoke of battles, of wagers, of the quality of the steel, but no longer of the quiet moments, of the thoughts that kept him awake at night.

you wrote on, your own letters becoming more desperate. and the replies that came were from a stranger.

lys agrees with me. i am thinking of staying. the climate is better for my health.

your heart froze in your chest. you wrote back, your hand shaking with a new kind of fear.

what do you mean, staying? your place is here. your duty is here. i am here.

he never answered that letter.

months turned into a season. the ravens from lys stopped coming altogether. you told yourself he was busy. you told yourself his duties kept him from writing. you told yourself anything but the truth, which was a cold, creeping vine around your heart…he was forgetting you. he was caught up in the fighting and the fathering of bastards, and he kept telling himself he would respond tomorrow, but tomorrow never came.

the quill felt like a lead weight in your hand, but you lifted it. the ink in the well was as dark as your despair. you wrote until your soul was hollow, scraped out, leaving nothing but an echoing cavern where hope used to live.

then came the spring. the spring sickness.

it started as a whisper, then a crash. it swept through the city like a scythe, reaping a harvest of the young and the old, the strong and the weak. you locked yourself in your chambers, the air thick with the scent of burning herbs and fear. you had prayed for a child for so long, a living, breathing piece of the man you loved, a tie that might bind him home. and now, it seemed the gods had answered your prayer with a cruel joke.

the labor was short, brutal, and silent.

he was tiny, so terribly small, but he was perfect. a tiny, silver-haired babe, with the faintest, shimmering scales on his skin that caught the candlelight like dragon's glass. he had his nose, you thought, a small, delicate thing. and he had his father's eyes, you were sure of it, even though they would never open to see the world.

he was a poor, silent babe who never drew breath.

they took him from you, and the silence that followed was louder than any scream. it was a physical weight, a pressure in your chest that made it hard to breathe. you lay in your bed, your arms empty, your body aching with the phantom weight of him, and you felt as though you had been split in two. there was the you that existed before, and the you that existed now, a gaping, bleeding wound where your future had been.

and so, you wrote to him of your grief.

aerion, you began, your hand steady, betraying none of the tremor that shook your entire body. i write to you with the heaviest heart a woman can bear. the spring came, and it brought a gift, and it took it away in the same breath.

you told him about his son. you described the silver hair, the scales of a stillborn that marked him as targaryen. you wrote of the eyes that would never see his father’s face, of the tiny hands that would never grip his finger. you wrote with a cold, dead precision, as if you were dictating a report from a battlefield.

he was beautiful, aerion. he was our son, and he was gone before he could even be named. i held him for hours, waiting for a miracle that never came.

you paused, the quill hovering over the page. the pain was a physical thing, a beast clawing at your insides, trying to tear its way out. it felt as though your very bones had been hollowed out and filled with ice.

the grief is a pain so profound it has split me in two. i walk through the castle and i see his face in the flames of the torches. i hear his cry in the wind. i reach for him in the night and my hands find only empty blankets. they tell me it will get easier with time, but they are fools. it steals the memory of the warmth, the memory of the weight of him, until all i am left with is the shape of the loss.

you signed your name, the scratch of the quill the final, pathetic testament to your love. you sealed the letter, the wax a red, angry wound on the parchment. and then you waited. you waited for a reply that would never come, for a comfort from a man who had already forgotten you. you waited for a ship on the horizon, for a word, for a sign. but the only ships that came were bearing more corpses, and the only word from lys was silence. you had written to him of the greatest loss of your life, and he had been too busy, too distracted, too far gone to even read it.

the last of your strength ran out, and as spring sickness swept through the city, in your fevered delirium it took you.

you called for him. for your son. your last thought was not of anger, but of a profound, heartbreaking sorrow. he would never know.

two years later.

the ship that bore aerion targaryen back to king’s landing was a warship, sleek and black, a stark contrast to the gilded pleasure barges of lys. he was a man changed. he was harder, leaner, his face etched with new scars and a cold, cynical ennui.

lys had been a paradise, and like all paradises, it had rotted from the inside out. the fighting had grown dull, the women tiresome, a nagging reminder of a life he hadn’t truly wanted. he thought of the wife he had left behind with a pang of guilt that he had long since learned to ignore. he would see her. he would make it right. eventually.

he strode through the corridors, his purpose hardening with every step. he would find her. he would go to your rooms, and he would find you there, perhaps reading by the window, perhaps angry with him, but you would be there. he saw ser gerold hightower at his post outside the king’s solar.

"ser gerold," aerion bit out. "my wife. where is she?"

the lord commander of the kingsguard was a statue carved from stone and duty. his grey eyes met aerion’s without a flicker of emotion. "prince aerion. you have returned."

"do not mock me," aerion snarled, his hand going to the hilt of his sword. "where is my wife?"

ser gerold’s expression did not change. "i serve the king, my prince. and the king has no daughter-in-law."

the cold dread turned to ice in his veins. this was not just a lie…it was an erasure. were they pretending she never existed? playing a stupid joke? he turned on his heel and marched towards your chambers, his heart a frantic drum against his ribs. he remembered the way perfectly. third floor, overlooking the godswood, the door with the carved silver dragon on its surface.

he reached the corridor. it was just as he remembered. but the door was wrong. it was plain, unadorned dark oak. the dragon was gone.

he threw it open.

the room was not yours. it was a generic, sterile guest chamber, smelling of beeswax and disuse. the furniture was all wrong. the bed where you had lain together, where he had held you, where he had woken from nightmares to find your hand in his, was a plain, four-poster monstrosity. the tapestries you had chosen, the ones depicting the conquest of old valyria, were gone. the desk where you had written your letters was missing. the scent of you—of lavender and skin and home…was gone, replaced by the stale air of a room long abandoned.

he took a step inside, his boots loud on the stone floor. he ran a hand over the mantlepiece. it was bare.

"where is it?" he whispered, his voice cracking. "where are her things?"

he spun around and stormed back into the hallway, his eyes wild. he saw a chambermaid, linens piled in her arms. "you!" he roared, grabbing her by the shoulders. "the woman who lived in this room! where are her things? her gowns, her books, her jewels! where did they go?"

the woman looked at him with genuine pity, and that was somehow worse than the fear. "my prince," she said softly. "no lady occupies this room. this room is kept for visiting lords!"

the pity in her eyes was the final straw. he shoved her away, her pile of linens tumbling to the floor. he didn't care. he was already moving, his long strides eating up the stone corridor, his mind a maelstrom of denial and fury.

his father, maekar, stood by the map table, his back to the door. he didn’t turn. "is she at her family’s home? she would never go there without word from me. she would never abandon me. you will not lie to me. where. is. my. wife?"

maekar turned slowly. his face was a mask of grim resolve, his eyes tired and heavy. "she is gone, aerion. she is gone, and you will let her be."

aerion stared at him, his chest tight. he wanted to believe it was a lie. "gone?" aerion advanced into the room, his hands clenched into fists at his sides. "you erased her! you took her room, you have everyone in this cursed castle lying to my face! what did you do? did you have her killed? did you ship her off to some silent sister convent to be rid of her? answer me!"

the control he had been clinging to shattered. the rage he had felt in the empty room, the fury at the chambermaid’s pity, the cold fury at aegon’s lies, it all coalesced into a single, white-hot inferno. he slammed his fist down onto the map table. the intricate carved wood of the westerosi map splintered under the force. he grabbed the heavy iron figure of the iron throne and hurled it across the room, where it crashed against the wall with a deafening clang.

he swept his arm across the table, sending scrolls, maps, and inkwells flying. a pool of black ink spread across the floor like blood. he was a whirlwind of destruction, a dragon loosed in a stone cage, smashing and tearing at everything in his path. he stood in the center of the wreckage, his chest heaving, his breath coming in ragged gasps. he stared at his father, his vision blurred with a haze of tears and fury.

maekar had not moved. he had simply watched his son’s rampage, his expression unreadable. when aerion finally fell silent, the king spoke, his voice quiet, but carrying the weight of absolute authority.

"she is gone, aerion," he said, his voice heavy with a sorrow so deep it was almost worse than anger. "you will accept this, as you accept my command. it is done."

he saw it then, in his father’s eyes. it wasn’t just command. it was pity. and it was the final, cruelest blow. "where did she go then? taken her things with her?"

"no," maekar said, his voice dropping to a low, solemn tone. he took a deep breath, as if the words physically pained him. "she is dead, aerion."

the world tilted on its axis. "what?" he whispered, the word barely audible. "dead? what nonsense is this? she was…she was healthy when i left."

"the spring sickness," maekar said, his gaze unwavering. "it took her last year."

aerion stared at his father, his mind refusing to process the words. last year. she had been dead for a year. while he was drinking and whoring and fighting in lys, she had been dying. the guilt he had so expertly suppressed came rushing back, a tidal wave of crushing, suffocating force. he felt the air leave his lungs, his vision swimming.

"no…" he choked out, shaking his head in denial. "no. i would have known. i would have been told. the letters…"

"the letters stopped, aerion," his father said softly. "she wrote to you every day. until she couldn’t."

he couldn’t breathe. he stumbled back a step, his hand flying to his chest as if to physically hold his heart together. he remembered the letters. he remembered the stack of unopened scrolls on his desk, the ones he kept telling himself he would get to. he remembered the last one he had received, the one he had thrown into the fire without reading, her frantic script a tedious reminder of a life he was eager to escape.

"i have to…i need to see her things. i want to have my wife’s things…" he rasped, turning and fleeing the throne room, not caring about the protocol, not caring about the shocked whispers of the court.

maekar only nodded and provided aerion with the location of where your things were stored, up high in a cellar with all of the past heirlooms of the targaryen wives and husbands.

he threw the door open. he searched through the room and found your desk and a carved wooden box that belonged to you. his hands trembled as he opened it. it was filled with letters. dozens of them. all in her elegant, familiar script.

he sank to the floor, pulling them into his lap. he read them one by one, his vision blurring with tears he hadn’t shed since he was a boy. he read of her loneliness, her love, her desperate hope. he read of the child he had never known about, a son, lost to the fever. he read of her final, heartbreaking plea for a word, any word, from the husband who had abandoned her.

he reached the bottom of the box. there was one last letter. it was thicker than the others, sealed not with her personal sigil, but with the official wax seal of the red keep. his heart hammered against his ribs as he broke the seal.

it was not a letter. it was an invitation—a notice to attend the funeral services for prince aerion targaryen’s late wife.

he couldn’t breathe. the words on the page swam before his eyes, the elegant, formal script blurring into a meaningless smear of black ink. the invitation was dated from over a year ago. it was an invitation to her funeral. a funeral he had missed, because he hadn’t bothered to open a letter with the king’s landing seal.

a sound tore from his throat, a guttural, animalistic noise of pure agony. it was the sound of a man being ripped in two. he dropped the invitation as if it burned him, his hands flying to his hair, his fingers tangling in the silver strands as he rocked back and forth, a meaningless, desperate rhythm.

the box of letters lay scattered around him on the floor, a paper graveyard of her love, her hope, her pain. each one was a knife twisting in his gut. he had replaced her memory with cheap wine and the hollow laughter of courtesans, with the fleeting thrill of a duel and the meaningless siring of bastards who would never carry his name. he had traded his wife, his child, his honor, for a gilded cage of hedonism, and now the door had slammed shut, and he was trapped inside with nothing but the echoes of his own colossal failure.

he had chipped away at the fortress he had built around himself, and she had been the one to do it. she had endured his rages and his coldness, had seen the monster and loved the man trapped within. she had dismantled his walls, brick by painful brick, and he, in his infinite arrogance, had walked out of the ruins and left her there, alone. he had been so desperate to prove he didn’t need her love that he had thrown away the only thing that had ever made him whole.

the silence in the room was a physical weight, pressing down on him, crushing him. it was the silence she must have felt in her last days. he remembered her voice, the way she used to whisper his name in the dark, the way she had defied him, her eyes flashing with a fire that matched his own. he remembered the feel of her hand in his, the scent of her hair, the way she looked at him as if he were not a monster, but a man worthy of being loved.

he found the last letter she had written, the one about their son. his hands shook so violently he could barely hold it. he had a son. he had a son, and he had let him die without ever knowing he existed. he had let his wife face that alone.

he was a monster. not the one people whispered about, the arrogant, cruel prince. this was something far worse. he was a man who had been given the greatest gift in the world, love, and had thrown it away for nothing.

he stayed there on the floor of the desecrated room, surrounded by the evidence of his love and his loss, until the sun rose and set, and rose again. he did not eat. he did not sleep. he simply held her letters and read them, over and over, until the words were seared into his memory, a permanent, painful brand on his soul.

he would read them for the rest of his life. he would carry her words, her memory, as his penance. it was a punishment, his father had said. and now, finally, he understood. it wasn’t the exile to lys. the punishment was this. the punishment was coming home to find that the only person who had ever truly seen him was gone, and that he had no one to blame but himself.

he gathered the letters into his arms, clutching them to his chest as if they were her. he pressed his face to the parchment, inhaling the faint, lingering scent of her perfume, a ghost of a scent that was already fading.

“Get up,” Aerion hears, blinking blearily as his sheets are ripped off his body. “Aerion, get up! Now!” 

What the fuck—

Half awake, Aerion’s heart races as he pushes himself into a sitting position, trying to figure out what the fuck is happening. The only reason he doesn’t reach for his blade is that he recognizes your voice. He lets out a disgruntled noise when he feels fingers grab his cheeks hard, glaring when he sees your face inches from his.

Outraged, he sees movement from the corner of his eye and realizes that you did not come alone.

“What the fuck are you doing?” he demands, still trying to wake himself up. He tries to look to the side to see who the fuck you brought into his chambers, but your grip on his face tightens. He grimaces, giving you an annoyed look. “Answer me, you miserable wench. Why—”

“The Golden Company is in Lys,” you say, and Aerion doesn’t think that he hears you correctly at first, staring at you blankly. “Caelyx has clothes for you. Get up, and get dressed now.”

“What did you just s—”

Aerion’s head snaps to the left, a sharp pain spreading through his cheek as he stares at the open balcony looking over Magister Vyrano’s manse. 

Did you just strike him?

His tongue darts out to wet his lips, brows furrowing in disbelief. Before he can look back at you and demand to know what the fuck is the matter with you, he feels your hands cradling his face, forcing you to look at him again. 

“Aerion, wake the fuck up,” you say again, and he should be angry—he is angry, his chest is hot and bubbling, and his face stings, and indignity and pride flare terribly, and it all fizzles when he hears the fear plain in your voice. He’s never heard you sound this way before. He’s heard you furious, mocking, teasing, happy, but never scared. “Get up, and get dressed now. Stop asking questions. We do not have time.”

Aerion stares at you for a moment longer before he pushes himself out of bed, hardly given a chance to orient himself, before someone—your whore, Aerion realizes disdainfully, the silver-haired pillow boy who always attaches himself to you—is forcing silk chiffon over his shoulders. He looks at the white fabric that he’s being dressed in: revealing and clinging in a way that feels entirely inappropriate for the situation. Dress for a whore, not a prince. And then he looks at the fitted leathers you’re wearing, the red cape attached to your shoulder, the sword at your hip, and he shoves your whore away from him, sneering as he watches him stumble back into a table. 

“I am not fucking wearing this,” he spits furiously. “What the fuck is going on?”

“You’re going to wear whatever the fuck I tell you to wear,” you reply, undeterred by his fraying temper. You step closer again, and you grab his cheeks to force him to look at you. You don’t let him yank his face away when he tries. “We need to get you out of the manse and into one of the whorehouses so that your kin don’t come and slit your throat. I’ve arranged for the Second Sons to take you on a ship out of Lys to the Disputed Lands, but the ship doesn’t leave until tomorrow morning, and they cannot leave earlier without drawing suspicion. So for the next day, you’re going to be Ari of Lys, dragon prince, and Aerion Targaryen will have left Lys a moon ago because he grew bored with whores and wine. Do you understand?”

Aerion shakes his head, and when your whore tries to get the clothes on him again, he raises his hand furiously, threatening to put his fist into his face. You immediately raise your hand in response, threatening to strike him again. Aerion gapes at you, betrayed.

“If you strike him, dragon prince, I will parade you around as you are,” you hiss, pointedly looking down at his current state: bare-chested and hair sleep-mussed. “Caelyx was kind enough to let you borrow his silks so that you may not be entirely indecent when you step outside. Or would you prefer to be dragged through the streets half-naked for all of Lys to admire?”

“It is transparent,” Aerion says furiously. “I may as well be bare.”

“It is disguising,” you shoot back. “No one will look twice at another silver-haired whore on an island full of silver-haired whores.”

“I am not a fucking whore.”

“You will be whatever the fuck I tell you to be if it keeps you alive,” you shout. Then you exhale, rubbing your face. “Aerion, please—they are docking, they have probably already docked by now. We do not have time for this.”

Frustrated, Aerion glares at you, and then he glares at your whore, who has the audacity to give him a sweet smile. Aerion bares his teeth at the boy, a disgusted expression on his face as he returns to dressing him in the soft silks.

Aerion spits, “How many men have you let fuck you in this?” 

The whore raises his eyebrows, lips curled up. “They are my special silks, prince,” he purrs. He looks pointedly at you as he answers, “Only one person has fucked me in them.”

Aerion’s blood pressure skyrockets, pulse thudding dangerously in his ears as he turns to look at your whore. There’s no way that he’s being dressed in something that another man was wearing while you fucked him. The boy only gives him a smug smile, and Aerion’s gaze cuts toward you, questioning, and he blanches when he sees your eyes slide shut. 

Instead of denying it, you give your whore a long look—a warning. 

Aerion gapes again. “You cannot be serious,” he hisses at you, ripping his arm away when your whore tries to finish dressing him. “Will you—”

“We do not have the time for this,” you say through your teeth, turning a cold look on Aerion now, as though Aerion isn’t the victim in this situation. “Caelyx, stop antagonizing him. Aerion, get dressed.”

Aerion’s nostrils flare as he inhales deeply, tongue pressing against the back of his teeth as he wills himself to calm down. His gaze flicks back toward the open balcony as your whore—Caelyx—returns to wrapping him in the fine silks. He can’t see anything—Aerion’s balcony faces the west, and Lys’s ports are to the north, but he’s heard enough about the Golden Company in passing to imagine the fleet of ships with golden banners docking in the harbor. Recent reports have put their numbers at over twelve thousand—all of Essos has been whispering about them since the sacking of Qohor. 

“How many are here?” he asks you, jaw tight. 

“Enough,” you answer, arms folded over your chest as you stand in the doorframe of his chambers, one hand on the hilt of your sword, looking down the hall, as though you expect Aegor Rivers to come barreling down any moment. Aerion’s heart is pounding, he realizes, as the situation finally begins to hit him. “One of my harbor boys came running to me as soon as he saw the gold banners in the distance. I came here as soon as I got everything handled.”

Aerion lets out a sharp breath through his nose, dragging his hand through his hair as he paces once across the room, away from your whore, silk clinging to him in a way that makes his skin crawl.

“After you got everything handled,” he echoes, incredulous, turning on you, trying to turn the nasty panic that climbs his throat into something more manageable: anger. “Instead of waking me, you decided to—what—build a whole fucking scheme while I was asleep?”

“I did not have time to argue with you first,” you hiss. “By the time I reached the harbor to confirm the banners, the first ship was a mile out from docking. I—”

“You should have come to me first,” he interrupts, heat rising in his chest. “You should have—”

“Aerion.”

Aerion’s teeth grind, something uncertain spiking in his chest with his heart rate as he fists his hands at his side to hide the way his fingers tremble—he pretends it is fury and not fear. You look back over at him, gaze lingering on the way the sheer silks cling to his slim hips, hiding little more than necessary—barely what is necessary. He glares at you, but there is a lump in his throat, and he cannot swallow it away. 

Aerion could die today.

There is a really good chance that Aerion will die today. 

He exhales as he paces over to the balcony. When his back is to you and your whore, he lifts shaking fingers to his chest, over his rapidly beating heart. The last time it beat like this—wild and erratic, like it was trying to tear itself out of his chest—was during the Trial of Seven. In the mud, with blood in his mouth, in his eyes, iron on his tongue, vision blurring and head half in the clouds because he lost so much blood, staring up at a hedge knight who could have killed him if he wanted. 

He had been afraid. 

He’d been lying in the muck; he knew he had lost even before he yielded. He knew it the moment the oaf stood back up after Aerion had given it his all. He had no energy left, and he was bleeding out, and when he hit the ground that final time, he knew that he wasn’t going to get up. He remembers hearing his father yelling for him—my boy, Aerion! My boy!—and he remembers thinking that at least he would die in battle, at least he would die with his father’s voice in his ears, he would die knowing that his father cared enough to fight for him, to beg for him.

He is afraid now. 

And there is no oaf in front of him this time, no enemy wielding a blade that he can try to strike down, and no father to save him; just ships on the horizon, men he cannot see yet, and the suffocating feeling of knowing that they are coming from him. The Blackfyres are here, on this island, searching for him, and there’s nothing he will be able to do if they find him. There will be no yielding, no surrender. If they figure out he is here, they will cut his throat, and he will die cowering in silks instead of armor, in silence instead of with his father’s voice in his ears. 

He wonders, briefly and bitterly, if Maekar will even care. 

Probably not—no, there’s no probably about it. His father will not care. He did not care when Aerion was choking over his own blood, hardly able to speak, when he delivered the news that he would be sent across the Narrow Sea. He did not care to hear Aerion beg him not to do this, did not care when Aerion reopened the stitches on his thigh, trying to scramble after him when he turned his back on his own son. His father knew that the Blackfyres and their allies were across the Narrow Sea. Knew that this was a risk. And he sent Aerion here anyway. Aerion died to Maekar the moment Baelor’s heart stopped beating.

He will not care.

Maybe, even, he was hoping for this. 

A tragedy to befall the mad prince that he can work into a way to gather sympathy back home. Aerion was never useful to him alive, cost him far more than he was worth, but maybe in death—

Distantly, he hears you tell your whore to leave and then your boots clicking against the ground as you make your way over to him. He half wants to tell you to fuck off, to let him handle this himself, that he doesn’t need nor want your help, and he can face the Blackfyres himself, but then you slip your arms around his waist, rest your forehead against his shoulder blades, and the protests die on his lips. His throat bobs as your hand slides up his torso so that your palm is over his heart, feeling the rapid, fluttering pace of it. 

“Do you trust me?” you ask quietly, lips against his shoulder.

It terrifies him how easily the answer comes to him. “Yes.”

“Then trust me,” you say. “Go with Caelyx. He will bring you to the Perfumed Garden. The First Magister and I will be meeting the Golden Company in the central square. The Garden sits on the north end of the central square. You will be able to watch and listen to what we say to the Golden Company, and if things go south, Caelyx will make sure you get to the west side of the city and—”

“And what about you?” Aerion demands, whirling around to face you. “If things go south, you expect me to cower and hide while you—” While you die. He cannot even bring himself to say it. “I will not. You cannot expect that of me. You—”

“I’ll be fine,” you say dismissively. “I—”

“Do not take me for a fool,” he hisses. “There is a reason you are armed.”

You press your lips together, staring at him for a long while, and Aerion feels sick. They are here for him, they will kill him if they get their hands on him, and you are trying to send him away so they cannot, but if they realize what you’re doing, they will kill you. 

Aerion might die today, and Aerion might get you killed today, too.

He has never felt so useless before.

“They won’t kill me if things go south,” you finally say, shaking your head, and Aerion bristles, because you do take him for a fool and he should see your tongue removed for it, but all he can do is try to swallow his own as fear claws at his chest. “They won’t, Aerion. They will not risk making an enemy of Volantis. We have been over this before. If anything, they will take me hostage and—”

And what the hell do sellsword companies do with their hostages? he wants to scream at you. You are capable, he knows this. You are capable, and you are influential, and you are dangerous, but you are a woman. He wants to shake you to make you understand—if they take you hostage, then—

“They will do worse to you if they get their hands on you,” you say quietly. “They will make a spectacle of you. They will want something to show for it—something to carry back across the Narrow Sea and boast of. The Brightflame finally put out, the mad dragon tamed. They will keep you alive long enough for word to spread, long enough for your family to send men after you, and while they have you alive, they will do everything they can to break you—”

Aerion does not need to hear this from you. Doesn’t like the way it makes his skin crawl. 

“You are a fool if you think they would break me,” Aerion says through his teeth. “They—”

“They will,” you interrupt, voice so firm that it makes a chill run down his spine. “Aerion, they will break you. They will take their time, and they will make you into something that can be passed from hand to hand, something they can laugh over and parade about as a prize to mock your family. And once word has spread, and there is nothing left of you worth keeping, then they will kill you.”

“I would sooner kill myself,” Aerion hisses, but his stomach is turning, and the room feels too small, and the silk is too tight, and the air is too thin. “I would—”

You grab his face between your hands hard, pinching his cheeks, and Aerion loathes what you must see in your eyes to make the frustration and anger drain the way it does into something softer, grip on his face more gentle as your thumbs stroke his cheekbones.

“They would not let you, Aerion. Please stop fighting me. We do not have time for this.”

He glares at you, fury and indignation rising rapidly in his chest, because he knows that you are right. He knows it in the way his pulse will not slow, in the way his thoughts keep circling back to the same suffocating end, no matter how hard he tries to twist them into something else. He knows, and he hates it, hates that you have named it, hates that you are forcing him to look at it, to feel it.

Will his father even care? 

Will Maekar spare a second thought or go on his merry way?

“Do you trust me?” you ask again, firmer this time.

Aerion’s jaw tightens, and he nods.

“Then trust me,” you repeat, hands sliding from his cheeks to hold the back of his head, fingers threading through silver hair. “Trust me. Please. I need to meet with the First Magister before the Golden Company reaches the central square. Go with Caelyx and listen to him. He will relay everything else I don’t have the time to explain, okay?”

Aerion does not like it. He stares at you, and he is angry and helpless and so frustrated that he can feel his stomach churning, and he knows you know it from the way your eyes search his, begging him to just agree, not to make things more difficult.

He lets out a noise caught between a scoff and a sigh. “Fine. Fuck. Fine. But I do not like this at all, and if things go wrong—”

If things go wrong, then what? He’ll be dead, or worse. You’ll be dead, or worse. 

His throat bobs as he swallows.

Still, you say with a smile, “If things go wrong, you may hate me for it, and you may tell me I told you so when we meet in hell.”

Aerion snorts. “That is not funny, wench.”

You hum, lips still curved up. “It is kind of funny.”

“Not even slightly.”

You laugh, leaning in to press your forehead against his temple, and he sighs, eyes sliding shut. You ghost your lips against his cheekbone, and then turn his face slightly to the side so that you can brush your lips against his.

You say quietly, “Pāsagon nyke. Nyke gīmigon skoros iksan gaomagon.”

Trust me. I know what I’m doing.

“Gaoman pāsagon ao,” he murmurs. “Issa pōnta qilōni gaoman daor pāsagon.”

I do trust you. It is they whom I do not trust.

He feels you smile against his lips. The nerve.

“Eman ossēntan lēda qubykta vali,” you tell him, brushing your fingers through his hair. “Mirri kessa ivestragon iksan qubykta vali.”

I have dealt with worse men. Some would say I am worse men.

Aerion scoffs, but he finds himself smiling. “Iksā iā mittys, iksis skoros iksā,” he replies, voice weaker than he intends for it to be. “Māzigon arlī naejot nyke. Konir sagon iā udrāzma.”

You are a fool, is what you are. Return to me. That is an order.

Your lips curve up again, and you tilt your face to ghost your lips against his temple. “Kesan va moriot māzigon arlī naejot ao, zaldrīzes dārilaros.”

I will always return to you, dragon prince.

It should bring him some semblance of comfort, but the pit in his stomach only worsens.

———————

 “You should be paying attention to me, prince,” your whore drawls as he leans against the  doorframe to the room Aerion is waiting in. “I am trying to teach you how to behave properly as a courtesan.”

Aerion’s eye twitches, but he doesn’t look back at him, staring into the central square as you talk quietly to the First Magister, standing between him and his son, several of the Second Sons and the magister’s household guard lingering behind the three of you. 

This is the first time he’s seen the man look so serious—he’s always been quick to smile, friendly enough to be overlooked, though you are quick to tell Aerion that he is quite the cruel gossip behind closed doors. A vicious tongue and sharp mind to match, because one does not become First Magister in Lys without both at his disposal. 

Aerion has always dismissed it when you would tell him this; he’s never been able to reconcile the man you lauded as quick-witted and ruthless with the jovial man he portrays himself as, but now he can, with the way his eyes are cold and expression is stern as he stares in the direction of the ports, head tilted slightly toward you as he listens to whatever you’re saying. His son stands slightly behind the two of you, stiff, hand on the pommel of a decorative sword, gaze flicking nervously, visibly taking deep breaths to calm himself. 

“Did you know Marcellus asked her to marry him when she first arrived in Lys?” Caelyx says as he makes his way over to where Aerion is sitting, lounging on the cushions across from him. Aerion gives him a cool look, but the whore only raises his eyebrows, smiling easily, as though the Golden Company isn’t about to come down on Lys. 

“Who the fuck is Marcellus?” 

Caelyx lets out a huff of laughter and then nods out to where you’re standing. Aerion realizes he must be referring to the First Magister’s son—Aerion never even bothered to learn the idiot’s name. He scoffs and says, “Him? He is a fool. I once saw him trip over his own silks walking into a feast. Nearly took half the table with him. Then had a servant whipped to make it seem as though it was her fault.”

“He is an idiot,” Caelyx agrees, taking a sip of wine, unbothered, “but he is also pretty, and he is also cruel, so that makes him just her type.”

Aerion sneers, gaze flicking back out to where he’s standing just a smidge too close to you. He isn’t sure if he’d go so far as to say pretty—he’s sun-kissed, tall and thin, not toned, missing the lean muscle Aerion has, missing the silver-gold hair of Valyria, even if he does have the purple eyes. It’s a tawny brown instead, braided over his shoulder; he finds himself shaking his head, a scoff on his lips. 

No, Aerion thinks bitterly, not pretty at all. Not nearly your type.

“She liked him well enough for a few months,” Caelyx notes, smiling to himself as he watches the square. “Lasted longer than most, poor boy actually thought she might marry him. Eight whole moons, then he didn’t exist to her anymore. The two of you are coming up on that, aren’t you?”

Aerion stills, gaze sliding from the square to the whore sitting on the cushions next to him—too close to him, too smug. Aerion does not have time for this. Does not have time or patience. The Golden Company will arrive any moment, but—

—but he does not like the mockery in his tone. The implication. Aerion is not stupid, he knows what your whore is trying to say, and it settles very, very poorly. 

Caelyx leans in a little, so close that Aerion can smell the cherry wine on his tongue. “I could teach you to pleasure her,” he murmurs, leaning in closer to brush his lips against Aerion’s ear. “So that she does not become bored with you like she does everyone else.”

Aerion shoves him away hard, seething. “I should take your tongue, whore,” he spits. “Who do you think you are?”

Caelyx is unbothered, smiling still as he leans back against the cushions again. “I only mean to help, prince—”

“My prince.”

“Would that you were,” Caelyx drawls smugly. “Think on it. We both know she grows bored easily, and we both know that in the five years she’s been here, she’s never grown bored of me. I love nothing more than to be of use. We could have fun—the three of us.”

“Do not speak to me again,” Aerion says through his teeth. “If you speak to me again, I will have your tongue removed, and not even she will be able to save you.”

“Did you know that sometimes she enjoys taking the lead?” Caelyx continues, unperturbed, silver hair falling in his eyes as he tilts his head to the side. As Aerion’s about to spit out a yes, reminded of the countless times you forced him onto his back and climbed on top of him, Caelyx adds, “In ways most men are too proud to learn.”

Aerion pauses, brows furrowing as he casts a side eye toward the whore, unsure of what exactly he is implying. He fights a snarl when he’s met with another too smug smile. 

Caelyx only smiles wider. “It can feel good for men too, prince,” he purrs, leaning in again. “Taking it the way a woman does. She knows how to make it feel good.”

Aerion’s face burns hot as soon as Caelyx’s words register. He flounders, lips parting, attention drawing from the square fully now. Vile words threaten to burst from his lips, pride and indignity warring, insult for this whore to say something so crude, but they die in his throat, strangled by the heat that floods his chest and the unwelcome flicker of curiosity that follows. He hides it with a scoff, but—

His thoughts traitorously cling to the idea, envisioning what your whore dared to imply. He can see it too easily—your hands on Caelyx, pushing him back against the bed, holding him there, his head tipped back, mouth parted, gasping, moaning, violet eyes rolled back as you press deep inside him and take what you want.

Something green and ugly twists in Aerion’s chest, breath quickening, rage curdling, and then—

Then it turns. Then it is your hands on him instead, firm at his hips, nails digging into his skin as you force him down, as you hold him there, and all he can do is take everything you’re willing to give him. It would be a fight—everything is always a fight with the two of you, a war for dominance with blood drawn and bruises painted on smooth skin. He would not yield to you, not so willingly, not like your whore, but you would make him yield, and Aerion would—he would enjoy it. Aerion has never let anyone take control like that, has never given it, has never even considered it. The very idea should disgust him, should make him recoil the way he did just a moment ago, but it doesn’t.

He chokes, breath catching in his throat, heat flooding his face as he realizes how much his thoughts have drifted—that Caelyx has noticed it too, from the way satisfied expression on his face—and Aerion jerks his gaze away like he’s been struck.

“Shut up,” he snaps hoarsely, jaw clenched so tight it aches, because he cannot tell if he wants to rip Caelyx’s throat out for saying it or himself for imagining it.

Luckily, or unluckily, maybe, Caelyx does not have the opportunity to respond, because the Golden Company finally approaches the square. 

Disgust curdles in Aerion’s stomach when he recognizes Aegor Rivers standing at the head of the group, black hair loose at his shoulders and dressed in plain armor, the Valyrian sword Blackfyre sheathed at his hip. 

For a moment, he nearly rises. The impulse is sudden and violent—grab a blade, any blade, and cut his way through them until the bastard bleeds out in the dust and that stolen sword is returned to where it belongs. 

Behind the bastard are the false claimants. Aerion recognizes them without introductions, and it makes him sick. It makes him sick that they look like him. Sick that they have the same silver hair, the same violet eyes, the blood of Old Valyria running just as true through bastards and pretenders as it does through him—and they dare to stand beneath the banner of the black dragon. 

His body shifts, nails biting into his palm and teeth grinding together. 

He hates them. He hates the way they stand there like they have a right to be, like they have not stolen everything they are from his family and twisted it into something lesser. Hates the way the city seems to hold its breath for them, as though they’re something to be reckoned with instead of something to be stamped out. 

He starts to rise, and your whore tenses on his opposite side as though to stop him, and then—

—and then the First Magister steps forward, and Aerion loses the opportunity. 

He draws blood from how hard he bites his tongue, feels it dripping between his knuckles, too.

“I must say, if you have come to conquer our fine city with such… modest forces, then you will find us less accommodating than you might hope,” the First Magister says, eyes sharp as he stares down at the Golden Company from the top of the marble steps. “We do not take kindly to uninvited guests.”

Aegor Rivers does not rise to the bait. He paces a few steps forward, standing at the foot of the steps, gaze sweeping from the First Magister to you to the First Magister’s son, and finally to the men arrayed behind the three of you—a small regiment of the Second Sons, Lys’s gonfaloniere, and the household guard. The other magisters are nowhere to be seen. 

It is a statement of unity, Caelyx had explained when Aerion first made note of it—the Golden Company is not welcome in Lys. 

“We are not here to conquer, magister,” Aegor Rivers replies at last, inclining his head to the First Magister. “We hear you harbor a guest of particular interest to us, and we hope to come to an… understanding.”

“How unfortunate that you have come all this way for a rumor,” the First Magister replies with a thin smile, and he exchanges a quick look with you that Aerion isn’t able to read, “and without the decency to give notice before your arrival. One would almost think you meant to insult us. Did you mean to insult the magisters of our lovely Lys, my lord?” 

“He is no lord,” you interrupt blandly. “You are being far too generous, magister.”

Aerion’s lips curl up despite himself. But then you throw a wink back at the First Magister’s son, Marcellus, who snorts at your words, and his smile flattens, irritated again. He side-eyes the two whores who slip into the room with them—two girls, he’s seen them hanging around you before, but he doesn’t know either of their names.

“Caelyx,” the taller one says, glancing nervously out to the square. “How is it going?” 

“She’s only insulted them once,” Caelyx says as he smirks into his wine. “So I would say well.”

The shorter girl laughs, settling onto the cushions next to Aerion, resting her head on her arms as she looks out into the square. Aerion finds himself irritated again all of a sudden—the silk clings to him, too soft and too light and too wrong, and the scent of perfume and wine hangs thick in the air, cloying and suffocating. 

He should be down there—at your side, at the First Magister’s shoulder, steel in hand, not hidden in silk and pillows and painted smiles, not tucked away among whores. His fingers curl into the cushions, nails biting into the fabric as his eyes track you. This is fucking humiliating. He exhales hard through his nose, trying to calm his temper.

“Watch yourself, prince,” Caelyx drawls, watching him carefully from the corner of his eye. Aerion sneers at him. “I only mean to say that you know what is at stake. Do not let your pride get the best of you.”

“I do not need you reminding me, whore,” Aerion scoffs.

Still, his stomach flips as he remembers what you said earlier. He does not want to think about that, because if he thinks about that, he thinks about how he got here, and if he thinks about how he got here, he thinks about his father, and if he thinks about his father, he will wonder—will he even care? And Aerion will not like the answer he comes to, so he cannot think about what will happen if the Blackfyres see through the lies, so he does not.

“I had thought Lys better governed,” Aegor says after a moment, “than to allow its… wards such freedom with their tongue.”

You tilt your head, considering him. 

“And I had thought you more impressive,” you reply. “Given the stories.”

“Across the Narrow Sea, a ward who spoke so carelessly would find herself corrected. Firmly,” Aegor says after a moment, voice low and edged. “It is a failing of the Free Cities that they keep such a gentle hand in the face of such disobedience.” 

“If you are so fond of firm hands, I suggest you sail back to your Sunset Kingdom and find one willing to keep you,” you say, smiling, until you are not. “If you ever imply I need to be firmly corrected again, I will skin you alive and pour salt over every inch of your body.”

Aegor’s mouth curves, faint and humorless. “A bold threat,” he says. “Though I wonder—would your hosts thank you for starting a war in their square? It would be a shame to see Lys burn for your temper.”

“Lys would not be the city that burns, sellsword. It will be your ships and your men,” you drawl. “The sacking of Qohor has made you bold, but Lys is not Qohor—nor is Volantis, and you tread on making an enemy of both.”

“You are an exile, my lady,” Aegor says coolly, tilting his head. “You think your city will go to war at your whims.”

“Exile, maybe, but I am old blood, and you are the son of an Andal whore. They would never suffer the insult without consequence.”

Aerion barks out a laugh.

“It’s good to know you haven’t lost your teeth in the years you’ve spent amongst silk boys,” an unfamiliar voice says from the crowd of sellswords. Your expression shifts instantly, the irritation disappearing, eyes widening, and a pit inexplicably forms in Aerion’s stomach. He spares a glance at Caelyx, but Caelyx put down his wine, frowning as he straightens from where he was leaning back against the cushions. “I warned him that you would eat him alive if he tried to play this game. You should have listened, Rivers.”

Aerion watches as a man with silver hair, braided back from his face, makes his way across the marble toward you, all careless smiles and casual arrogance. He is tall, thin, but lean in the way of a man who knows weaponry, not the pillow play of the Lyseni silk boys—and he is very, very pretty. He dresses like you in black leather with a red cape over his shoulder, and he wears Valyrian steel like it’s fucking gold on his fingers, on his neck, on his ears, a sword at his hip and a dagger at his forearm. 

Aerion knows before either of you speaks. 

All of the tension bleeds from your body, disbelief spilling across your face, and Aerion feels sick to his stomach already. 

“Jaenys?” you gasp, a breathless smile spreading across your face as you make your way down the steps to meet him halfway. Aerion doesn’t realize he’s rising to his feet until he already has, jaw tight as he watches the way the man reaches for your waist, pulling your body close until it’s flush to his. Your hands rise to his face, gentle, your cradle his jaw, thumbs brushing his cheekbones like you need to make sure he’s real. Aerion’s stomach twists. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“That’s one of her friends,” one of the girls says, and Aerion’s teeth grind because that is not the way friends hold one another. “From back home. I recognize the name.”

That is the way—that is the way you’ve held his face in the cove, in bed, when it is only you and only him. He watches as you let out a bright laugh, genuine and pretty as a bell, more real than anything Aerion has ever heard from you before. And Aerion feels fucking sick—he feels sick, and he does not want to see this, but he cannot draw his gaze away, watching as the other man draws you in close, burying his face in your hair, pressing his lips to your temple, your neck, laughing into your skin. 

“Why is he with the Golden Company?” the other girl asks warily. “Caelyx, what should we do?”

Caelyx is no longer drinking. He has set his wine aside, watching the scene with calculating eyes, and he’s holding a small bowl in his right hand, and distantly, Aerion recognizes the fine powder that sits inside it from the corner of his eye, but he’s more focused on you, on the way your gaze traces Jaenys’s face, the way you’re holding him, the way he’s holding you. You’re talking to him, but your voice is too quiet now for him to overhear from the Perfumed Garden, as though you’d forgotten he was listening, forgotten you’d promised that you would talk loud enough so that he’d know what was happening, forgotten about him. 

Aerion’s fingers curl at his sides, nails biting into his palms as he watches the way Jaenys lifts your hand to his lips, kissing your knuckles, your wrist, your pulse, smiling into your skin—the two of you curling into one another like the Golden Company is not in the square, like there’s no danger and no one is watching. 

What the fuck?

You say something again, too quiet again, and then you nod toward the Perfumed Garden, and Aerion’s heart drops to his fucking feet. No—no, you wouldn’t. His mind scrambles to make sense of the motion you just made, to force it into something that doesn’t feel like a blade sliding between his ribs. You wouldn’t just—you wouldn’t just give him up so easily, not like that, not after everything you said, not just because, not just because—

He can’t even finish the thought, because he can’t even fucking convince himself of it. He knows well how much you long for home, more than he does; he knows the way you speak of the people you left behind, the future you lost, and he knows—

“It’s not what you think,” he hears Caelyx say, but it feels like there’s fucking cotton in his ears. Everything feels distant and far away, and he can only stare out at the square, at the way your head is bent together with Jaenys, at the way you motion again to the Garden, to Aerion. “It’s not—”

“I know,” he spits, and then he laughs once, sharp and humorless. “You do not need to—I do not need—”

He can’t even get a fucking sentence out, and his face flames red with humiliation, and his breath is too shallow. You wouldn’t, you wouldn’t—iksan aōhon, iksā ñuhon. You said it, he said it. You would not give him up so easily. 

“She told me to tell you that if the Golden Company pressed for negotiations, she would bring it to the Perfumed Garden so you could listen in on what’s being said in the chance it pertains to your house,” Caelyx says, and then shifts closer. Aerion shifts away, bumping into the whore on his other side, and he suddenly feels too closed in and too distracted, because he can’t drag his eyes from the square. “You need to take this.”

“I am not drugging myself when they are five feet from the fucking door,” Aerion snaps, rounding on him, voice low but vicious. His hands are shaking now—he curls them into fists to hide it, nails digging deeper into his palms. “When they will be in the same fucking room as me. Have you lost your damn mind?”

Caelyx doesn’t flinch. “You will give yourself away the moment they start talking about you or your family,” he says, lifting the bowl slightly, the fine powder shifting inside. It’s not the same one you took with him in the garden at the revel—this one is a shimmering blue. “Look at you.”

“I am fine,” Aerion spits.

“You are not,” Caelyx replies flatly. 

Aerion’s pulse won’t slow; his thoughts are spiraling, circling back to you, the Golden Company, Jaenys, that gesture, to the way it looked, to the way it felt, to the way it hurt. Aerion isn’t even sure if he’s breathing properly.

Will his father care?

Will he think twice when news reaches him?

Will you care?

Will you—

Caelyx’s gaze flicks behind Aerion, and Aerion catches it a split second too late. His gaze snaps behind him as the woman on his opposite side grabs his right wrist hard, pinning it to the cushions, while the other one grabs his left. Aerion thrashes, but they are stronger than they look, and Aerion is thoroughly distracted.

“What the fuck—” Aerion snarls, twisting hard, muscles straining as he tries to rip himself free. The cushions shift beneath him, silk sliding, his footing useless, and fury spikes hot and immediate, cutting clean through the panic. “Get your hands off me—”

He jerks again, violently this time, and one of them gasps as his shoulder clips her, but her grip doesn’t loosen. The other tightens, digging her fingers into his wrist hard enough to bruise, and Aerion cannot get his footing for leverage to pull away.

“Hurry up, Caelyx!” 

“You think you can lay hands on me? I am a prince of the blood,” Aerion spits, voice dropping into something more dangerous but riddled with panic that he cannot quite push down. His eyes flash, violet gone almost black in his rage. “I will have your hands for this—I will have your tongues, your lives—every last one of you—”

“Hold him,” Caelyx snaps, all softness gone.

Aerion bares his teeth, lunging forward despite the hold on him, trying to get at him, to hurt him, because this—this humiliation, this loss of control, this—

Caelyx moves faster. A hand fists in Aerion’s hair, yanking his head back hard enough to make his breath hitch, his throat exposed, jaw forced open on a startled inhale, and then fingers are shoved into his mouth, the powder coated on digits, and Aerion chokes, thrashing hard now, rage turning wild and frantic as he bucks against their hold. Your whores, to their credit, look guilty—the girls do at least, Caelyx is only watching with thinly pressed lips, holding his face and his nose so that he cannot breathe, forcing him to swallow the powder he pushed into his mouth.

“Sorry, prince,” Caelyx murmurs, though he doesn’t sound all too sorry. The powder is already dissolving on Aerion’s tongue, bitter and strange, and when he tries to gasp for air, he swallows. “She told us to use whatever force was necessary if it came to this.”

He shoves Caelyx away hard, scrambling off the cushions to the marble floor, on his hands and knees, vision blurred as he tries and fails to gag up whatever they forced him to take. One of the girls has the audacity to creep closer to him, worried, and he bares his teeth at her furiously, grabbing whatever is closest to him—a glass— and flinging it hard at her head. It misses, shattering against the wall, but it still has its desired effect, as the girl scrambles away.

“I’ll kill you,” Aerion gasps, eyes wild and furious as he stares up at Caelyx, who hasn’t budged from the cushions. “All three of you, her, I’ll kill you all, I’ll—”

Caelyx sighs, gaze drifting out to where you’re still laughing with your friend, limbs entwined, faces too close together, to where the Golden Company is waiting for the two of you to stop talking, and he says quietly, “Let’s make sure you live long enough to have the opportunity, yeah?” 

Will you care? Will you care? Will you care?