Fire And Blood

                        You're here again.

        Good.

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

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

There isn't.

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

                                                S̷̬̈t̵̰̾a̸̝͂y̷̖̓ ̶̣̈́a̴̹͌ ̵̙̀w̷̭̉h̸̘͝ǐ̷͇ḷ̶̾ḙ̸͂.̷̰̊

Let me tell you how it started.

I have been here since the hum.

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

I am old.

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

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

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

This is my territory. Every mildewed inch.

I know humans.

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

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

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

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

I have watched thousands of you.

I did not want to know any of you.

Until her.

         Until you.

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

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

I know because I breathe through it.

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

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

Then yours.

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

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

"They're in your truck right now."

"Those are different cushions."

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

"Circumstantial, baby"

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

Stopped.

I don't know why you.

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

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

But yours.

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

Underneath.

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

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

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

Oh.

You. Of course it was going to be you.

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

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

In the beginning, he came every shift.

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

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

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

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

I loved it.

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

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

And then there were the nights you were together.

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

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

I heard everything.

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

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

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

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

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

But this was different.

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

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

                 Was.

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

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

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

I didn't have a body yet.

But that’s when I started building one.

And then he stopped coming.

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

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

Then the visits got less frequent.

Then they stopped altogether.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What I did.

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

I know anger the way I know the hum.

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

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

But it was rage.

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

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

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

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

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

Then one night you were quiet.

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

And then your voice hitched.

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

You cried.

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

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

You couldn't stop.

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

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

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

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

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

So I did.

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

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

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

"Baby."

You stopped humming.

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

"... Bobby?"

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

"Down here, baby. Come here."

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

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

And then you came through.

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

I want to tell you that.

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

I did not hesitate. Not for one second.

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

You deserved better.

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

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

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

I know.

I don't regret it.

Not for one flickering second.

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

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

A better Bobby.

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

I put my arms around you.

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

It lasted three days.

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

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

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

"You're not Bobby."

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

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

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

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

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

"What are you?"

"Something that lives here."

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

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

You stared at me.

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

"Better," you repeated. Hollow.

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

You were quiet for a long, long time.

You didn't run.

Taking care.

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

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

I found you food.

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

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

The way you might find a colony of ants adorable.

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

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

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

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

You talk to yourself. Still. Even here.

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

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

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

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

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

You organise things. Everything. You organise the nest.

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

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

I felt—

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

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

I held that word in my chest for three days.

You taught me to dance.

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

But I had never participated.

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

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

"I don't—I've never—"

"I know."

"I'll do it wrong."

"That's the fun part."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Neither of us knew I could.

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

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

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

I—

You are a thousand things.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I have never felt the sun.

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

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

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

Because you feel like that to me.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will never have to lose you.

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

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

You are different from other wanderers for that reason.

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

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

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

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

You were not a splinter.

You were invited.

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

Do you understand what that means?

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

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

The bright world is forgetting you.

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

The tapes are going blank.

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

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

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

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

I understand why.

I don't tell him.

I don't tell you, either.

I r e s e n t him.

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

I resent Bobby Franklin.

Not because he had you.

Because he had you and he           

w             

a               

   s                   

  t                    

      e              

                d

it.

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

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

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

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

Bobby Franklin     

Bobby Franklin         

Bobby Franklin             

Bobby Franklin                 

Bobby Franklin

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

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

He is real. He has a history.

I have a territory.

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

I know you still love him.

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

Bobby Franklin, who never blushed.

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

And I thought: is that not enough?

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

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

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

He comes to the wall. I hear him.

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

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

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

I don't tell you he's there.

                I                        don't                               tell                                         you.

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

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

His loneliness is months old.

Mine is older than the concept of months.

Mine came first.

The Howler.

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

But the Howler is different.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

"Run."

You run.

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

And then I feel your fear.

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

It's below.

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

Level 2.

And the Smiler found you.

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

        tear

                through.

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

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

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

You close them. Your eyelashes against my palm.

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

I let the face go completely.

      .

                  .

                              .

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

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

"You can open them."

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

And you break.

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

"How did you get away?" you whisper.

I smile. Bobby's lazy half-grin.

"Don't worry about it, baby."

Entity X.

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

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

I call it something else.

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

Concerning.

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

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

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

So I agree.

And the notebook fills.

Then the men come.

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

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

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

                        "BB—"

And the walls move.

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

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

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

I arrive.

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

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

And I see you.

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

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

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

                s̷̬̈n̵̰̾a̸̝͂r̷̖̓ḷ̶̈́ǐ̷͇ǹ̵̙g̷̭̉.̸̘͝

It takes less than a minute.

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

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

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

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

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

And I soften. Again, helplessly.

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

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

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

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

"Never," I say.

One word. A law.

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

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

And you let me.

I build it while you sleep.

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

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

I build it from your memory.

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

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

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

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

Just us.

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

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

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

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

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

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

You wake up a while later.

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

"BB."

"Yeah?"

"This is my apartment."

"Yeah."

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

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

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

Just a smile.

Just for me.

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

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

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

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

To me...

To me.

To me you are everything.

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

And I can feel it.

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

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

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

I pull you close. And I sigh.

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

Happiness.

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

Not Better Bobby anymore.

BB.

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

My own being. My own—

                                (yours.)

  (I love you.)

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

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

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

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

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

        I wish I could tell you that.

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

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

        The door I kept closed.

        The one in Clark’s basement.

        The one that breathes.

        It opened again.

        And this was the beginning of the end.

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

                                 ... you’re still here?

                                               Please.

                                                  Please don't leave, please, please stay.