Emma

But there’s something else catching your eye.

The marks.

The sticky, tacky substance that starts red, acrid and thick until it turns black like tar. There’s more of it as you scroll, more of it that appears. A trail of it is scattered across the floor in the last few tapes, long and wide, like something had been dragged through it.

Blood.

It’s blood.. and then something else.

The camera is set down, but Bobby isn’t anywhere to be seen, in fact, no one is.. You think at least, until the tapes start to play for longer, leaving enough space for sound to come through. Humming. Distant buzzing that you only guess is from the office like panel lights overhead. You squint your eyes just to get a better look at it, every angle near identical to the last, halls and corridors that seem to stretch right into the darkness before it blinks bright and dusty again.

A figure stumbles into view then, limping at the end of the corridor, arms outstretched around the corner. There’s red on his shirt, but you can’t see a wound, only him, the more he steps into frame. His shirt, his jean shorts, his face. It’s Bobby. He looks faint, all colour drained from his face as he stumbles to the floor just directly in front of the lens.

He must have been running, dropped the camera and come back for it. It’s the only thing that makes any sort of sense. But what he was running from you can’t tell, there’s nothing else there, only walls, a doorway that stands tall in the far corner that he sits by.

The last shot has him wheezing, picking up every grunt and heave that escapes his lungs as he goes to pick the camera up. A loud bang echoes around him, shaking the surroundings with it.

“Fuck fuck fuck..” The recording shifts right into his face, the dark circles underneath his eyes reflecting the darkness set inside of them. An unusual black in the bright blue. But there’s more. A retching that follows, one that ends the tapes altogether, because it drops from his hands again and into the floor with a stutter.

Noises break through the speaker, far too loud than anything else you’d heard and you can’t make out what it is. Only that they sound animalistic.. and wrong. And the only thing it can be coming from, is Bobby.

—

"I've missed these.. You wanted the regular ones or double stuffed?" His mouth is full, a smile on his lips. And for a second you forget. Your hand shoves at the camera, sliding it across the table wearily, resting back into your arm.

He slings the paper bag onto the counter and you quirk a brow, sinking into the chair as the heartbeat in your ears thrums louder.

He doesn’t seem to notice, closing the door behind him with his foot, stuffing another oreo into his mouth.

"Because apparently there's like, seven different types now and I kinda panicked.”

His lips purse against your temple, and you feel it. His smile, soft and wide, and he’s warm, curling around you before he moved, the smell of cheap gas station coffee and outside going with him. The chair creaks as he slides into the seat opposite you ruffling with the bag with more things he’s bought. A lot more than what you wrote on the note.

A few cartons of milk, some bread, snacks, and anything that will fill the fridge. A fridge way too small to fit everything he brought home.

There’s deli meats and pastries, candies, and far too much fruit than he’d ever eat, like a kid had just gone inside the store and ransacked the whole place.

That was another thing that you had noticed. His appetite. It had been two and half weeks since he’d been home, it was to be expected, you had no idea what he ate in there. Something not right or enough given how thin and frail he was, but now, it was like he had never eaten before.

"I was thinkin'.. why don't we go for a drive." His elbows press onto the table, blinking up at you with that hopeful expression. His mouth is full of whatever other snack he’d started to swallow, fingers wrapping round the wrapper to take more. Sweat beads across his forehead, little droplets that drip onto his brow, even though the chill of the morning air still drift through the windows.

It’s not warm enough yet, and he didn’t seem out of breath before. Odd.

“I- I’d love to.. but are you sure you’re feeling okay to go?” You’re watching him closely, not enough for it to alert him but it’s sharper, focused.

The guilt eats at you the most. To question it all. People disappear they're supposed to come back changed, traumatised, broken even, not back to normal. But that's what'sconfusing. Because he is.

And he has been, for the most part. It’s like he never left at all. But maybe that’s what the problem is.

He holds your hand just as tight, curling his fingers around yours, stroking it at the knuckle and tracing in between the fingers. His smile beams at you whenever you seem to catch it, so warm through the brokenness like the first time he plucked up the courage to approach you in the corridors at school. And that was years ago, and now, he’s still trying, attempting at what normalcy there is.

He holds the rest back. Bobby puts it into everything else he can. The few days that you had to go back to talk to the police, he did his best, he told them all he could, that they should investigate, so what they can to figure out “whatever the fuck is going on” with an arm curled over the back of your chair as they asked the same to you.

And they were only left with the same answer. I don’t know. They weren’t convinced, neither was Bobby, and he still isn’t. Maybe it still is a dream, some fucked up acid trip like Kat said it was and that they were dosed.

But you’re real, you’re here with him and you’re what he holds onto, and he does. It repeats into his head like a mantra. Every time he checks the doorway just to make sure you’re still inside of the room, every time his arm curled around your waist just to rest his chin onto your shoulder. And every time he claims you over and over again.

It comes in waves, sometimes worshipping, slow and working you down, inching you down onto the bed, sliding down onto his knees with the way he presses kisses to your knees before he devours you. Consumes you entirely, his nose pressed sharp into your neck as he settled inside of you, sometimes just to stay there for a moment, letting you take all of him.

Other times it’s merciless. And he makes it just as reverent, but he snaps cold, the kind that clouds you over in a haze, one that chokes you more than his fingers tightening at the back of your neck. His hand clamps down onto your hip, keeping you tight to him, keeping him anchored inside of you as he drives into you with a pace that undoes you both and leaves you feeling him for days.

He breaths apologies into your skin, vowing with the graze of his teeth, sometimes too hard, leaving your fingers threaded through his hair with a sharply cry. But he can’t get enough. Even when you’re sobbing, begging for more, telling him it’s too much, not enough, he wants it over and over and over. He lets you have it, makes you take him until you’re slick together in that sticky sheen, his cheek pressed into the hammering flesh of your chest, listening.. studying. Until he flips you both, carefully tugging you back up into his arms.

That’s when he’s softer, he always is. That doesn’t change, kisses to the crown do your head and fingers tracing the lines of your back. Whispering and reassuring over and over again.

You did so good baby.. He mumbles into your lips just as he slips free from you, settling you both together as he rests back onto the pillows.

I’m here.. I’m not going anywhere. His eyes stare out into the darkness down the corridor, hands moving with an absentminded care to wrap the thin, patchy covers over you.

I love you, I love you, I love you. He repeats that, as much as he can, as much as feels necessary without sending him spiralling. Or at least until you fall asleep.

He can't shelter you, he knows that and he wouldn't try to. You’re already seen it, believed in all of the madness he swears to you that he knows how weird it sounds. And that’s what’s killing him, more than whatever else is intent on tearing him open from the inside, because he wants you to believe him. And even though the officer stares blankly at you both, the ceiling fan spinning jaggedly above you, and every bounce of Bobby’s leg anxious and unnerved, you do.

But it's the changes. The only thing that leaves you wondering. And that's where you seem to forget, so quickly it plagues you, like something is swarming your mind and blocking it from accepting. Every oddity, everything that turns you away and sends shivers up your spine, disappears with a single blink of an eye.

As if it was never there.

Every twitch and wrong movement he makes, it’s gone as fast as it comes.

So you keep on telling yourself that. It’s him, it’ll alright.

“Yeah.. yeah, I’m okay.. it’s just something to do. Just us..” His hand reaches for yours across the table, palm opening to invite your hand, his voice softening at the last few words. The ‘us.’

You reach back instinctively, sliding your hand away from where it sits at your jaw to slot it into his. It eases in, moulding into his without any fuss, his fingers soothing over your own. The warmth that overcomes you shouldn’t feel wrong, but somehow it does, like the only calm before whatever storm is building around you.

So you escape it, dragging yourself up from the chair, offering him a small smile. Jackets are grabbed off of the rack, both sets of keys are snatched from the counter, and the snug fit of the blue helmet cuffs your ears. He’d bought you it weeks into dating, one of the first gifts he had ever given you. It had been less chipped then, a deep azure blue that matched what he always thought of the ocean.

The city still wakes by the time the bike roars beneath you, your knees pressed into Bobby’s sides as you sit behind him, arms wrapped tightly. He drives steady, easing in and out of the growing traffic, sensing the tension in your back. You cross the freeways until you make your way out from the suburbs, wide lanes opening up into palm trees and the silhouette of the mountain range in the distance.

It’s been too long since you last saw the ocean, since you last took time like this. The last time was a few days before he went missing. He’d been moaning about that shift, shrugging it off with hands fumbling around the thrifted polaroid camera Kat had gifted him. You’d asked him about it, joked that it was only a few hours, only a weekend.

That he’d survive.

You’d almost forgot about that, about the way he cracked a small, tired smile, eyes only fixated on you. His jacket hung around your shoulders, the sea breeze blowing through your hair, and although regret burrowed inside your chest at the thought, you couldn’t help remembering the way he looked at you. Like everything that was coming to him that he didn’t even know yet, all the complaining that he didn’t want to work didn’t matter, because the gaze set on you was firmly as if you had hung the stars.

And it’s the same way he looks now..

The weight of his arm is slung around you, lazy but needy, fingers enclosed at your forearm jsut to keep you there. Wind curls through his hair, brushing the golden strands from his forehead, the cuts on his face still healing, but promising.

“Such a good view..” He squeezes you into him, mumbling into your hair, and you know what he means, even as you stare out into the horizon, colours of reds and pinks swirling where the waves crash. Because he’s not taking that in, not nearly as much as he is, you.

“Nerd.” You huff a laugh, for once the smile meeting your eyes genuine and warm, fingers bracing up into his chest.

“Mhm.. all yours though.” Your lips press together then in one steady turn of his head, and for a second, everything slips away. The investigation, the behaviours, the missing posters, the tapes.

It’s just you both. And it’s all him. Messy and impulsive, arms curling around you from behind where he stands to hold you closer. Fairground food wafts over the breeze of salty sea air, and you both watch the sunrise settle over the beach. For now things are okay, they’re safe.. they’re known.

Beneath it all there are words that Bobby can’t say, things he feels he can’t put his finger on, because he doesn’t know what it means. Because that’s what it wants. And it is.. an it. The unexplainable part about all of this that he can’t tell to even you. That something is making the thoughts in his head run like code, sentences that too fast, too foreign and ancient for him to recognise.

Things far too primal, too raw for him to understand.

Hold onto you, stay by your side. Those ones he recognises, because those are the ones he fought for even inside that place, those are his own. Keep you.. that one that comes later, when the night closes in or when he has too much time to think alone. And it’s blinding, ringing through his head so sharply the pain stings his temples, fighting the sudden urge to claw at himself and track down what his mind, his body is pushing him for.

You.

He wants to tell you, he tries to without breaking down, without feeling entirely lost. And he can’t, he can’t do it. So for now he watches as much as he can, clings to you like a lifeline. Even if the urge to breathe you in every time he’s near, to nearly not tear himself apart while his hands tremble just touching you is past controlling. It’s something rabid. Something people would look at him funny if they could see it. But it knows better than that..

That’s only for you to see, and only for him to feel.

It’s learnt too much over time to let it go unnoticed. You were what Bobby wanted, longed for in that endless space, what he’s had for so long, so loudly and so soulfully every wiring and chipped paint had been cried and punched at for all the miles he walked. And now you were the fuel for a cruel, aching desire, far more distorted than his own.

His eyes darken, honing in on only you, his fingers trace through your hair while he noses at your cheek, breath ragged and uneven. The kind that makes you laugh a little and nudge, “Are you okay baby..?”

And somehow that only makes it worse. Because your voice is soft and gentle, your back pressed into his chest on the couch or wherever you’ve found yourself at that time. He reminds himself he’s at home, or most of him is. He’s with you. But it’s eating at him.

The want, the need. The face that in every atom of his being, it’s clawing to get out.

—

So be breaks silently.

He breaks down in the mirror, by the windowsill in the kitchen out of the way. He leaves early in the morning coming back with blood on his knuckles and some splattered his cheek. He doesn’t say where it comes from, but he lets you clean it up anyway, forgetting to wince where it’s stopped hurting.

Where his body rejects all harm done to it. Every scratch marks, every cut, gone far quicker than it should. And it only leaves you with more of.. nothing.

You want to ask about the tapes, about the camera, about what you saw the first few nights when he came home. Even about where Kat and Clark have gone and why he’s the only one found.

The questions get to be too much.

Why doesn't he sleep? Why does he keep staring? Why won’t he let go?

Why does he keep asking if I love him?

And he does. Over and over. Every sleepless night, pulling himself from you reluctantly, he takes a minute to watch over you, to follow the pattern of your breathing like he’s memorising it. He doesn’t have to speak it for you to know what he means.

You still love me right? Please.. please tell me you do.

Neither of you are sure why he asks. But if his eyes aren’t dark, they’re pleading, unsure of himself and what’s going to happen. Because you let him have you, you let him kiss and hold you, but how can you really want it when you look so.. confused, so uncertain?

It feeds from it, works him down into a shell only to build him stronger again. And that something, is trying to become him.

—

"Who are you..really?"

Your hands fumble with the camera, clutching the plastic so hard it's bound to break beneath your grip. Bobby stands just across from you, hands at his sides. The circles under his eyes have grown darker, sagging at the corners where sleep can't reach him anymore. But the look in them, they're still soft, and pleading.

"Baby."

That should make you stop. The familar drawl in his voice, the fact it doesn't falter, not once. But you can't.

"Don't."

Tears well in your eyes, and they do the same in his. If they are tears at all. You're not certain what's real anymore, if it's just on command, a way to mirror you, or him, but somehow it breaks you further.

"Who are you..." You stop yourself there, blinking harshly as you swallow. The word, the idea doesn't even make sense but it comes out any way, “what are you?"

The viewfinder trembles and he reaches out his arm, by a few inches alone, like he's going to catch it from falling, but he stops himself. Bobby would do that, Bobby would reach and jump for it at even the thought of it breaking. And yet he pulls back, the action foreign in its movement. But you can't see it, your heart pounds so hard inside of your chest it feels hollow, and the questions run around your mind.

Why?

"Listen, this shit.. none of this shit makes sense I know, but you've got to believe me I- I don’t get it either." He pleads with you, starting forward until he manages a step, slowing when you back up again.

"You're not him." It comes out spitting, the words a faint bite on your lip.

Bobby stills at that, the words die on his tongue and he just.. pauses. Freezes on the spot at the other side of table in the distance you've put between you. He doesn't cross it, even though he wants to. Some part of him wants to knock the chairs and table out of the way and send them crashing into the wall, another part of him wants to leave, to give you space the space and rethink.

But all of him.. every part of him that he can hold onto, wants to cross that distance and take you into his arms again.

Your eyes are burning, and they look so cruel, they feel it too. And they must do, to look so accusing, so unsettled and confused. But they have a right to be.

He knows that. And not because he's caught, or because he isn't holding onto whatever truth is believable at this point, because it wounds him.

".. I don't feel like him any more."

Your arm drops with the weight of the camera, sending it clattering onto the table, the plastic still pressed tightly underneath your hand. His face drops, still looking, still searching your own like doing so will somehow make his point easier to trust. It looks pained, like every muscle is pulled so taut it's about to burst a vein, like the body isn't even sure what to do with itself.

A moment passes between you, a few simple seconds and the air between you grows thicker and unsteady, so hazy it feels like you could choke on it. But not like the remnants of pot that you're used to sifting through the apartment, and not the street lamps stirring up the shadows across the wall. From the surreal feeling, that you can't grasp.

His face flickers then, a shiver wracking his body as he fumbles with his fingers, picking at the skin.

Only then does he take his eyes away from you, casting them around the small space in the kitchen. He's thinking, rethinking and doing it all over again, you can tell. Blue eyes dart to the cupboards, the table, the sink, the coffee pot on the counter. All of the things they seem to make sense, that feel familiar.

They stop when they land at your feet, the hard press of your slippers into the linoleum flooring, and his brows furrow. They cloud over then, his head snapping up so fast it must make his own head spin.

"But I came back.. I'm here."

Something else washes over him entirely. The pain is still there, so is the confusion, but there's more, like everything from only a minute ago drifts.

There's a switch. He somehow looks hopeful, eyes growing wider like he's about offer a smile, the one that leaves you thinking. Your fingers grip the camera harsher, sliding it back toward you slyly, your other hand clutching the chair at your leg.

Is he?

You tremble, a shiver wracking all the way from your ankles to your fingertips. Another endless night of agony, of changing, of whatever that was stood in the corner of the bathroom, and it had left you both here, standing across the room from one another unsure whether to pounce or fall.

“Why are you looking at me like that..”

“Bobby—“ It’s broken the way it comes out of your mouth, the syllables faltering along with your trembling lip.

“No..”

It’s panicked from him, and his head shakes back and forth fighting the thought to step forward, step closer. And then back again. “No no.. please don’t.”

Your skin feels on fire. You don’t know what you saw, if he is talking to you or even himself, or if you can even understand any of it, but whatever it is, whatever is taking over, it’s not right.

“Why don't you believe me?”

“I don’t.. know.”

A moment passes, and something decides the answer isn’t good enough. It isn’t telling. And it flicks off in his brain.

“WHY.”

Bobby crosses the room then, ignoring the way the chair leg knocks into him as he scuffs the floor. His arms tighten at your shoulders as he reaches you, not gripping but touching, his nostrils are flaring from what you can make out in the dark. It’s not meant to hurt you, he doesn’t want that, it doesn’t want that, but it wants to know..

“I don't know what you are..”

That breaks open something in his eyes, the tears welling so blindingly that you can see your own reflection inside of them. He slows down, rethinking retrying, breathing as smoothly as he can, inching his face down level with yours, letting you see all of him.

“I’m here..”

He tries again. But you can’t bring yourself to raise.

“Baby, look at me.. fuck please look at me.”

You breathe sharply, you go to speak but you can’t. And so you swallow, and do it again, this time you do look at him, staring back blankly with every emotion you’re trying to fight from overflowing.

“Why didn’t they ever get this?” The camera radiates between you, held right between your faces. His eyes dart to it, only for a second before landing back onto you.

“I didn’t give it to them..”

“Why?”

He doesn’t say a word.

“Why Bobby?”

You’re not sure if it even is Bobby anymore, but whoever is standing in front of you responds to it.

“They already think I’m crazy.. what do you want them to lock me up in a nuthouse?” It’s an attempt at being funny, whatever funny is, but it’s not to play it off, it’s the sick, watered down version of the truth.

It’s your turn to be quiet. The muscles of your shoulder blades poking into the wall, framed by him still, and you can only manage a look.

“You know that we need to..”

“I do,” His head falls, hand raising slowly to find yours holding the camera, “I’m trying baby.. I’am.”

You want to push him away. You should. But you can’t, instead you let him take your hand, falling back between you as he moved the camera back onto the table, your other raising to his cheek.

His eyelids flutter closed, the tears staining his cheeks, the same way yours are wet with them.

“I just wanted to keep you safe, both of us.. Just let me, trust me Angel..”

You tense, only slightly, because his fingers are digging in, too sharp and too harsh, and because his eyes are wet with tears and the same blackness that dripped from them before.

And he looks terrified.. of himself, of everything. And you’re the only thing keeping him grounded.

“Stay with me.. please.”

There’s a mumbling under his breath as he turns his head into your neck, one that isn’t his, and you hear it ringing in your ears, his skin buzzing underneath yours as you hold him. But you can’t quite bring yourself to make it out.