forever is the sweetest con

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

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

BB built this for you.

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

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

He started building it after the agents.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You've been here a while. 

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

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

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

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

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

BB doesn't talk about it.

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

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

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

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

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

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

If you wanted to.

The if is the problem.

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

You feel loved here.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You go still.

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

Keep smiling through, just like you always do—

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

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

“Hey.”

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

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

He holds out his hand.

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

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

You seize his hand in yours.

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

You've been teaching BB to dance.

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

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

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

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

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

You look up at him.

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

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

He smiles at you.

Small. Crooked. Genuine.

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

You gaze at each other.

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

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

You don't look away.

BB's gaze drops.

To your mouth.

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

His breathing changes.

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

“Can I—” he starts.

Stops.

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

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

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

He trails off.

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

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

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

BB makes a sound.

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

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

“A kiss,” he whispers.

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

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

Your breath hitches.

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

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

You want this.

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

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

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

You don't stop him when he leans in.

His lips brush yours.

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

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

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

Heat.

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

BB is worse.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

You smile. Your nose bumps his.

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

The heat still sits in your veins, humming through the places where his mouth was, and the words come out low and warm but certain.

BB's face transforms.

The worry dissolves. What replaces it is satisfaction. Feline. Deep. The slow, spreading pleasure of a thing that’s been told it succeeded at the one task it cared about. And the expression settles onto Bobby's features in a way that is entirely BB's. Not the cocky grin, but quieter, more private, enormously pleased, a contentment so total it rearranges his face into a shape Bobby never wore.

He leans in. Presses his lips to your forehead.

Gentle. Unhurried, lingering. His mouth is warm against your skin, and you feel the hum transfer through the contact. That low, steady vibration, his frequency, the sound that lives in his chest and translates through his mouth into a pulse that settles behind your sternum like a second heartbeat. 

He holds the kiss there. Two seconds. Three. His hand cradling the back of your head, his fingers in your hair, and the gesture is so tender and so completely his that the breath leaves your body in a long, slow exhale.

You close your eyes. Lean into it.

Bobby never used to kiss your forehead.

Bobby kissed your mouth, your neck, the spot below your ear that made you gasp. Bobby kissed with intent, heat, and skill. Bobby kissed like a man who knew exactly what he was doing and wanted you to know he knew. 

But the forehead—that quiet, unhurried, undemanding press of lips to the place above your eyes—that was never in Bobby's vocabulary. 

It was too tender. Too unperformative. Too much like a devotion and not enough like a statement. Bobby declared. And the soft devotional gesture of forehead to forehead, mouth to brow, the kiss that says I cherish you instead of I want you—that was always one of the doors Bobby bricked up, one of the tender things he couldn't do because doing it would've meant admitting the size of what he felt, and Bobby's whole life was an exercise in pretending the feeling was smaller than the room.

Vera Lynn unsticks from her glitch, and the last notes of the song drift through the apartment like smoke (some sunny d-day), and you are here. In a kitchen that was built for you by something that heard you cry through a wall. 

You lean into lips gentle against your skin and close your eyes. 

BB pauses at the threshold of the apartment.

He does this now, the pause, the backward glance, the half-second where his body is already oriented toward the corridor but his attention is still tethered to you. 

It started after the first kiss. A new subroutine in him, a step added to the departure sequence that wasn't there before, and you've watched it develop over the past few days.

“Perimeter check,” he calls out casually. The half-grin flashes. “Back soon.”

You cross the kitchen, pressing your lips to his cheek. A quick, light contact, the kind of kiss that says be safe without saying it.

BB's hand catches your chin.

His fingers close around it,, his thumb and forefinger framing your jaw the way he'd frame a shot if he were Bobby, if he had a camera, if the instinct that lives in those borrowed hands were pointed at a lens instead of at your face. He tilts your head. Tips it up. Holds you exactly where he wants you.

And he kisses you.

Full, wet, unhurried, his lips parting against yours with a confidence he didn't have two days ago in the kitchen. He's been learning, replaying, refining, the way he refines everything, and the kiss he gives you now is deeper than the first, more certain, carrying the heat that slammed through both of you the first time and has been simmering since, banked but not extinguished. His tongue brushes your lower lip. His fingers tighten on your chin. 

He makes that sound again. The low, needy one, the one that lives at the back of his throat with the purr, and he tries to swallow it, almost, but not quite.

BB pulls back. A centimetre, his mouth hovering.

“Was that okay?” he breathes out, his breath on your lips. His eyes search yours with that earnest, slightly worried focus. Still checking, treating every escalation like a threshold he needs your permission to cross.

You nod. You don't trust your voice. You stay close, your forehead almost touching his, breathing the same air, and the hum in the walls dips low and warm around you.

BB presses his lips to your forehead. Holds them there. 

"Stay," he murmurs against your skin.

Then he's gone. The hum adjusts, tightens, and you're alone in the apartment with the ghost of his mouth on your brow and the taste of him on your lips.

You decide to sort the nest to kill time.

It doesn't need sorting, really.

BB arranges it with a precision that borders on pedantic, the blankets layered in an exact order, the pillows positioned at angles he's adjusted over weeks of watching how you sleep. But your hands need occupation, and your brain needs distraction, because the kiss is still on your mouth, the taste is still there, and the wanting is a warm, heavy thing in the pit of your stomach. 

And if you don't move, don't work, don't put your hands on fabric and fold, you're going to lie down on this bed and think about his fingers on your chin and his tongue on your lip and the sound he made, and you can't afford to be that soft right now. Not while he's out there. Not while Entity X is out there.

You refold the top blanket. Smooth the creases. Adjust the pillow on the left side—your side, the one that holds the impression of your head—and reach for the second pillow, the one on BB's side that he doesn't need but uses because you told him beds have two pillows and he'd looked at you with that tilted curiosity and said why? and you'd said because that's how it works and he'd said that's not a reason and you'd said because it means someone else sleeps here too and he'd gone quiet for a long time and the next morning there were two pillows.

You're smoothing the second pillowcase when you hear it.

Your hand stills.

“—not about that, can you just—”

Your voice. Your own voice, coming from somewhere beyond the apartment walls, floating through the hum the way Vera Lynn had floated. Sourceless, directionless. Except this isn't music. This is you. A version of you from before, the you that existed on the other side of the wall, and the sound of your own voice reaching you from the yellow makes your blood slow in your veins.

“—I'm just asking if we're okay, Bobby, that's all I'm asking—”

And then his. Bobby's. The real Bobby, the original, the voice you haven't heard in— 

You don't know how long. Months. Maybe onger. And the sound of it hits you in the sternum like a fist because it's exactly the same, the same timbre and cadence, the same tired dismissive flatness that used to make the back of your throat burn.

“We're fine.”

Two words. Tossed over his shoulder. The verbal equivalent of a shrug, of a turned back, of a man already looking at the television while his girlfriend stands in the kitchen with her hands gripping the counter and her chest full of words she's running out of courage to say.

“You keep saying that, but you don't—Bobby, can you look at me? Can you just—”

“I am looking at you.”

“You're not. You're looking at the screen. I'm asking you to turn around and actually—”

“What do you want me to say?" And there it is—the edge. The blade that lives under the casual, the sharp thing that comes out when he feels cornered, when the conversation is moving toward a territory he doesn't want to enter. Not anger. Worse than anger. Impatience. A man who’s decided this conversation is unnecessary before it started. “We're fine, babe. I'm here. What else do you want?”

“I want you to talk to me—”

“I'm talking to you right now. Stop trying to turn this into a fight.”

“That's not—Bobby, that's not what I mean, and you know it.”

Silence of a man who’s already disengaged follows, who’s pulled the drawbridge up mid-conversation and is now sitting behind his own walls waiting for you to exhaust yourself against them. You know that silence. You lived inside that silence for months. You drowned in it.

You set the pillow down. Your hands are trembling.

You know you shouldn't. Your instincts are screaming loudly. The animal brain hisses warnings. The brain that’s spent months learning the rules of this place and the first rule, the foundational rule, the one BB drilled into you before he taught you anything else, is stay in the nest. Stay in the apartment. Stay inside the protection he carved for you out of Level 0's guts.

But your voice is out there. Bobby's voice is out there. And the sound of that exact conversation—that devastating, ordinary conversation, the kind you had a hundred times, the kind that ended with you staring at the ceiling at two AM—is pulling at you the way gravity pulls. 

Not curiosity. Recognition. The lure of an old wound being reopened.

You step out of the apartment.

The corridor beyond the front door is yellow. Long. The sublevel hallway that connects the apartment to the main body of Level 0, the passage BB carved like a throat between his territory and yours. 

The fluorescent lights buzz overhead in that flat shadowless drone, and the hum is steady, even, unchanged. Nothing looks wrong. Nothing feels wrong, except that your voice is coming from the far end of the corridor, from beyond the doorway where the sublevel opens into Level 0 proper, and the conversation is continuing, rolling forward, playing itself out like a recording that doesn't know it's being listened to.

“—I feel like you don't even notice if I'm here or not. Bobby, do you notice? Do you notice when I'm standing right in front of you?”

Your eyes burn. The lump in your throat is solid, immovable, sharp-edged. You walk toward the sound. One hand trails the wall, and your bare feet are silent on the carpet, and the conversation beyond pulls you forward step by step.

“You're being dramatic.”

The words hit you like a slap. Not because they're new. Because they're not. 

Bobby said that. Bobby said those exact words, in that same exact tone, with that exact tired, dismissive, I-don't-have-the-energy-for-this tone, and the accuracy of the reproduction makes your skin prickle because the Backrooms shouldn't have this. 

The Backrooms shouldn't have the argument you had on a random Tuesday in October in a kitchen in Santa Clara. The Backrooms shouldn't know what Bobby sounded like when he was making you feel invisible.

“I'm not being dramatic, I'm being honest, I'm trying to tell you that I'm hurting and you won't even—”

“Hurting from what? Babe, I don’t want to fight. Stop turning everything into an argument.” Bobby's voice, louder now. The edge hardens into a wall. “You want me to sit here and—what? Have a feelings conversation? I'm tired. I worked all day. Can we just—can we not?”

You stop at the doorway.

The sublevel opens into the corridor beyond. Level 0 proper, BB's territory, the locked-down hallways that nothing enters and nothing leaves. The lights stretch into the yellow distance. The carpet extends, flat and damp, into the dark. 

The conversation is louder here, bouncing off the walls, your voice and Bobby's voice layered on top of each other in a terrible intimacy, and your eyes are full, and the anger is back. The buried anger, the one BB identified months ago, the one you folded into self-doubt and swallowed. It's risen now, pulled to the surface by the sound of Bobby refusing, again, to try. To talk. To turn around and listen. 

To look at you, see you standing there with your heart in your hands, asking for the bare minimum, and be told you're being dramatic.

The doorway is empty.

Your voices continue, playing in the walls. But there's nothing there, just the corridor. More of the yellow, and the dark at the far end, where the lights don't reach. Where the fluorescents give way to a blackness that is too thick, too solid to be ordinary shadow.

You stare at the dark.

The dark stares back.

Your sweat goes cold. A full-body temperature drop, your skin prickling from scalp to ankles, every hair on your arms standing in unison, and the moisture on your palms turns to ice water, and your heartbeat detonates. Slams against the cage of your ribs so hard you feel it in your teeth. Once. Twice. A third time that shakes your vision.

The conversation stops.

Your voice. Bobby's voice. Gone. Cut off mid-sentence like a throat being closed, and the silence that replaces it is not Level 0's silence, not the hum-filled quiet of a place holding itself still. This is the absence of sound. The void where sound should be. A silence so complete it has its own pressure, pushing against your eardrums, filling your skull with a static that isn't static but attention. 

Vast, focused, oriented entirely on you.

The dark moves.

A motion that starts at the far end of the corridor and travels toward you with unhurried, deliberate patience, like whatever it is has all the time in the world and knows it. The fluorescent lights flicker (one, two, three in sequence), and when they reignite, they’re not yellow anymore.

They’re red.

A deep, arterial crimson that transforms the corridor into a visceral maw that looks less like a hallway and more like standing in the inside of a throat. The carpet darkens. The walls darken. Familiar geometry of Level 0 warps under the red light into a place you don't recognise, a version of BB's territory that has been flooded with something foreign, something that changes the colour of the air itself.

The lights flicker again. Red, black, red, black. A strobe, pulsing, each flash revealing the dark a little closer, a little more solid, a shape forming inside it the way a body forms inside smoke, and in the stuttering crimson you see it.

Your head tips up.

And up.

And up.

It comes into the red light the way a whale breaches water. Slowly, the sheer scale of it requiring a recalibration of your visual field that your brain refuses to perform.

Your legs won't move. Your body has locked up, every muscle seized in the ancient, primate, pre-verbal grip of a fear so total it bypasses the nervous system and goes straight to the marrow. 

This isn’t the Smiler or the Howler. This isn’t six agents with weapons and tactical vocabulary. This is the thing in the notebook. The symbol you drew on page after page, updating weekly, tracking its movements at the perimeter with clinical detachment because clinical detachment was the only way to hold it at arm's length.

It's not at the perimeter anymore.

It's tall. Obscenely, horrifically tall. Its body fills the corridor from floor to ceiling, which suddenly seems too low, its shape pressing against the walls as if the hallway were built around it, or as if it had grown to fill the hallway.

It's shaped wrong, proportioned wrong, only vaguely humanoid silhouette stretched to the breaking point and then stretched further, limbs too long, muscular, joints articulating at angles that make your eyes slide off them like water off glass.

Its skin is more like a hide. Leathery. Matte. A deep, dark red that absorbs the crimson light instead of reflecting it, like something that was red once and has since become a surface that eats light and gives nothing back. No texture. No sheen. The flat, dead finish of something organic that has forgotten how to be alive.

And it has no face.

The surface where a face should be is smooth. Featureless. A blank expanse of that matte leathery skin, curved slightly, like the inside of a mask, and the blankness is worse than any feature could be because your brain keeps trying to find the face, keeps scanning the surface for eyes, mouth, nose, any anchor of recognition, any sign that what you're looking at is a being and not a wall of skin that has learned to walk.

Then the eyes appear.

They don't open, they emerge. 

Bulging outward from the surface of the face, pressing through the skin like something hatching, the leathery hide stretching and thinning and splitting apart in wet, peeling seams, and what emerges is yellow. Burning, furnace-bright yellow, the colour of the fluorescent lights distilled and concentrated and superheated until it became something that hurts to look at. Two points of searing amber in the featureless red, and they fix on you.

They fix on you, and they don't move.

Tears spill down your cheeks. 

The animal body's response to being seen by something that should not be able to see. A reflex, a pressure release, your system venting whatever it can in a desperate attempt to process the input flooding through it. 

Your heart hammers inside your chest, your mouth bone dry. Your hands are numb at your sides, the fingers bloodless and tingling, and you can feel your pulse in your throat and your temples.

Entity X.

It's bigger than you thought. Bigger than BB's clipped descriptions and careful evasions. 

It fills the corridor the way a flood would. Totally, leaving no space unoccupied. And those eyes, those burning yellow eyes, are locked on you with a focus that’s not predatory. Not hungry. Patient. 

It’s been waiting for this, you realise with a lurch. To lure you out with the sound of your own voice and Bobby's voice and the argument calibrated to the exact frequency of your buried fury, and now that you're here, now that you're standing in the doorway with your tears on your face and your anger in your throat, it’s in no rush. 

It has what it wanted. Your attention. Your recognition. 

It reaches for you.

The arm extends. Long, impossibly long, the limb unfolding like a telescope, the joints articulating in that wrong way, and the hand comes through the doorway. Into the sublevel. Into BB's territory, into the space he carved and sealed and locked down, the space where nothing enters—

The hand comes apart.

Ribbons. The skin peels away from the fingers in long, wet strips, the flesh beneath splitting and curling back, and the arm disintegrates from fingertip to wrist to forearm in a cascade of shredding tissue that falls to the carpet in dark. Heavy coils dissolve on contact, eaten by the floor, absorbed into BB's territory like an immune response rejecting foreign matter. 

The barrier—invisible, structural, woven into the very air at a level you can't perceive—is doing what BB built it to do. Unmaking anything that tries to cross inside and harm you.

You scramble backwards.

Your heel catches the carpet. You stumble, catch yourself on the wall, push off, and your body is finally moving, finally responding. The paralysis encasing you cracks, and the survival brain kicks online with a screaming urgency.

You back away from the doorway, and Entity X is standing in the corridor beyond it, and you watch in mute terror as its arm begins to regrow. The ribbons reverse, the skin re-knitting, the flesh sealing back over the bones with a wet, thick sound like clay being pressed into shape.

It tracks your retreat with those yellow eyes, and it’s not even slightly bothered.

It’s not bothered at all.

It reaches again. The same arm, healed, whole, the matte red skin glistening faintly with the residue of its own reconstruction. It pushes through the barrier, and the skin starts to peel again. It pushes harder, the arm advancing centimetre by centimetre through the invisible wall, and the peeling is slower this time. 

The barrier is straining. You can feel it in the hum. A high, tight frequency that sounds like metal under stress, and Entity X is shredding its own flesh to reach you, and it doesn't flinch. Doesn't falter, those burning eyes fixed on you with an intensity that is not rage, not hunger, is something far worse than either.

It's insistence.

You turn and run.

The corridor stretches. Or you're running slower than you think, or the sublevel is responding to the breach by elongating, by putting distance between you and the doorway, and you sprint for the apartment at full speed. Your bare feet slap against the carpet, your breath coming in ragged, tearing gasps, and behind you, you can hear it. 

Not footsteps. A sound like tearing fabric, like the barrier giving way fibre by fibre, like something enormous and patient methodically peeling through a protection that was supposed to be absolute.

You slam through the apartment doors, gasping for breath. 

You scramble for the lock. It’s decorative, you know that, it's a human gesture in a human-shaped apartment, and it will stop nothing that just shredded itself through BB's barrier, but you still try, grabbing the bookshelf next. The one BB just arranged. Your notebooks cascade to the floor as you drag it across the carpet and shove it against the door. The wood scrapes, the weight of it pathetic against what's coming. 

You grab the kitchen table. A chair. The standing lamp from the corner. Anything. Everything. Piling it against the door in a barricade of furniture that looks exactly like what it is: a pathetic attempt to buy time.

“BB!”

Your voice breaks on his name. Cracks open, raw, a scream that comes from the bottom of your lungs and fills the apartment and bounces off the walls he built for you.

“BB, COME BACK! BB!”

The door splinters.

Not from the hinges. From the surface. The wood bulges inward, warping, then splits along a line running from top to bottom, and through the crack, you see it. The red. The matte, light-eating red. And then an arm. 

It comes through the gap the way the first one came through the barrier, fingers curling around the edge of the broken door, and the wood peels away from the frame in long strips. The apartment dismantles itself around the intrusion, BB's careful construction coming apart under the weight of something that will not stop.

The clawed hand reaches into the room.

You grab the lamp. The standing lamp, with a heavy brass base, the most solid thing within reach, and you swing it. It connects with the arm, bounces off the matte skin, and the impact travels up your wrists and into your shoulders, but the thing doesn't react. The arm keeps coming. You throw the lamp. Throw books. Throw a kitchen chair that shatters against the forearm and falls into pieces.

“Stay away from me!" You're screaming, your voice stripped raw, your body backing toward the far wall with nothing left to throw. “Get away—”

Entity X's eyes find you through the wreckage of the door.

Yellow. Burning. Fixed. It hasn't blinked. Through the barrier, through the peeling, the furniture and the lamp and the screaming. Those eyes locked onto you in the corridor, and they have not left you. 

They’ll not leave you, and the constancy of the gaze is the most terrifying thing you've ever experienced because it means you. You’re the target. You’ve always been the target. Whatever this thing is, whatever it wants, whatever fuel it runs on—it wants you, specifically, personally, with a focus that transcends predation and enters the territory of purpose.

The arm reaches for you. Healed. Whole. The stripped flesh re-formed, the fingers extended, and it's close enough now that you can see the texture of the skin. Up close, it's not smooth; it's covered in fine, hairline fractures. Like dried earth, something that cracked and sealed and cracked again, a surface that has been broken and rebuilt so many times, the damage has become a pattern.

The arm detaches.

Ripped, torn from the shoulder socket with a violence so total the sound it makes isn't a tear but a detonation. A concussive, wet blast that shakes the walls and sends a spray of dark viscera across the ceiling and the wrecked furniture and your face, warm and thick, smelling of copper and something older, something mineral.

Entity X's arm hits the floor. The fingers are still curling. Still reaching. Oriented toward you, even severed from the body.

The thing that threw it is standing in the doorway.

It’s not BB and not Bobby.

Not anything that has ever worn a human face, and you understand this immediately, viscerally, in the part of your brain that predates language and operates on pure animal recognition: the shape in the doorway is wrong. 

It's Bobby's height, but the proportions have shifted. The shoulders sit too wide, the stance too low, the geometry of the body rearranged into something optimised for destruction rather than disguise. The face is Bobby's face, but it's barely holding, the features sliding, the jaw too sharp, the eyes fully black. Two pits of absolute dark in a face that is coming apart at the seams. 

The skin is cracking. Not like Entity X's fractures—like porcelain, like a mask that's been struck, fissures radiating from the jaw and the cheekbones, and through the cracks you can see—not flesh, not bone, but nothing. An absence. A dark so total it makes Entity X's darkness look like shadow.

He's covered in black. Head to chest, arms to elbows, the viscous substance coating his skin and matting his hair to his forehead, dripping from his hands in long, slow ropes. Whatever distraction Entity X deployed to pull him from the perimeter, BB didn't just fight through it. 

He annihilated it. And he didn't stop to put the face back on before he came for you.

The hum collapses. 

The ambient frequency of Level 0—the constant, ever-present vibration that’s been the background radiation of your existence since you fell through the wall—drops to a subsonic register that you don't hear so much as feel. 

A pressure wave that presses against your eardrums, your chest, and settles at the backs of your eyes. The red lights in the corridor blow out. Every single one. The apartment goes dark except for Entity X's burning yellow eyes and the fissures in BB's cracking face, which glow. Faintly, coldly, with a light that has no colour name.

BB opens his mouth, and the sound that comes out is not a voice.

It’s the hum.

The hum itself, weaponised, concentrated, forced through a throat that has stopped pretending to be human. The sound fills the apartment, the corridor, the sublevel, more vibration than language, dragged through the collapsing shape of Bobby's vocal cords with a fury so enormous it makes the floor ripple:

“Clever distraction.”

Entity X turns.

The motion is glacial. Unhurried. The massive red body rotating in the wrecked doorway of the apartment to face the thing that just removed its arm, and even now—even turning to face BB, even orienting its body toward the threat—its eyes stay on you.

Its eyes stay on you.

The head doesn't move with the body. The neck articulates. Wrong, all wrong. Rotating independently of the torso at a degree that no anatomy should permit. The burning yellow gaze remains fixed on your position against the far wall while the body faces BB, the removed arm regrowing in wet, rapid pulses at the severed shoulder, rising to meet what's coming.

The fight starts.

You can't follow it. Not really. Not the way you'd follow a human fight, with fists and momentum and the readable physics of two bodies colliding. 

This is different. These are two beings that don't obey the laws of physics, tearing at each other in a space that's coming apart around them. 

BB moves the way he moved against the agents. Too fast, fluid, the human shape abandoned for something more efficient, more angular, more suited to what he actually is, and Entity X absorbs. Takes. Endures. 

BB tears through its torso, and the flesh re-knits immediately. BB shatters its jaw with a crack, the featureless face splintering like ceramic, the yellow eyes bulging through the fissures, and the jaw reforms. BB puts his fist through its chest, and the chest closes around his arm, and for a terrible second, they're locked, joined. BB rips free with a sound like tearing metal, and Entity X is already whole again, already standing, already watching you through the chaos with those eyes that have never left, never wavered, never once looked at anything else.

You're behind BB. Pressed against the wall, moving when he moves, keeping his body between you and the thing, and you're trying to be small, trying to be invisible, but Entity X doesn't need to see you to know where you are. It knows. The way it knew your voice. The way it knew Bobby's voice. The way it knew the exact argument to play through the walls to bring you to the threshold.

BB is winning. At first. His speed is devastating, his fury enormous, and Entity X staggers under the assault, the massive body driven backwards through the wrecked apartment and into the corridor, and for a few brutal seconds you think he's got this, he's got it, he's going to unmake it the way he unmade the Smiler—

Entity X catches his arm.

The movement is casual. Almost lazy. One massive red hand closing around BB's forearm mid-strike, and the force of the stop shudders through the corridor, through the floor under your feet. BB wrenches. Twists. The hand doesn't open. Entity X holds him there—one-armed, the other still regrowing—and for the first time in the fight, it isn't retreating.

It's pushing forward.

The shift is tectonic. 

Entity X drives BB backwards, and the corridor shakes around you. BB's feet leave the ground for a fraction of a second, and when he lands, his posture has changed. Less offensive, more braced, the shape of someone absorbing impact instead of delivering it. Entity X hits him. Open-handed, a strike that catches BB across the chest and sends him into the wall hard enough to crater the surface, and the sound BB makes is not a snarl. It's a gasp. A short, involuntary, winded exhalation, the noise of a body—even a body that isn't a body—taking damage it didn't expect.

And through it all. Through the fighting and the shattering and the black blood and the reknitting flesh.

Entity X's eyes never leave you.

The gaze stays locked on you with the serene, unwavering patience that knows this fight is temporary. That knows BB is between it and you, and that BB is the obstacle, but you’re the objective and obstacles, eventually, move.

BB goes down.

A blow you don't see—too fast, too angled, connecting with something vital in BB's body—and he hits the floor and doesn't get up immediately. 

He gets to his hands and knees. The black blood drips from his mouth now, from his nose, from a gash across his chest that isn't closing the way Entity X's wounds close. His arms are shaking. The human face is flickering. BB, then the thing beneath, then BB again, the mask destabilising under the damage, slipping.

“BB!”

You're moving before you think. Scrambling across the wreckage, over the broken furniture and the shattered doorframe, toward him, toward the crumpled shape of him on the floor, and your hands reach for his shoulders—

“Stop.”

His voice. A snarled command, delivered with every frequency he has. Human, inhuman, the hum itself weaponised into a single syllable that hits you in the chest like a physical force and roots your feet to the floor. 

He lifts his head. His eyes are black, and his mouth is black with blood. The expression on his face is wild, furious, terrified. An emotion he’s never shown you before, an emotion you didn't know he was capable of, and the terror is not for himself.

“Level 974.” He spits blood. Black. Thick. “Mr Kitty. You know the route. Go, now.”

“I'm not leaving you—”

“You’re a target.” Each word costs him. You can see it. The effort of speech, of maintaining the face, of holding the human shape together while the damage tries to unmake it. “As long as you’re here, it will not stop. It doesn't want me. It wants you. And I can't—” His jaw clenches, a tremor running through his arms. “I can't fight it and protect you. I need you gone. I need you out of range.”

Entity X rises behind him. The massive body straightening. The burning eyes on you. Always on you.

“BB—”

“I am older than this place.” Low. Fierce. Black blood on his teeth, and his eyes fully dark, the ancient thing speaking through the ruined face with a conviction that shakes the walls. “I’m older than the walls and the hum and the doors and it. I have survived every horror this place has made. But I cannot do it while I'm holding back.”

Holding back.

You understand, then. Instantly and fully. 

He's been fighting at half capacity. Less. Fighting with one hand while the other shields you, positioning his body between you and the thing, dividing his attention between destruction and protection and losing ground on both. But it's more than that. 

You look at his face—the cracking face, the flickering face, Bobby's features sliding and reforming and sliding again—and you understand the other constraint. 

The one he'd never say. The Bobby suit. The face, the body, the human shape he's maintained for you since the day you came through the wall. It takes power to hold it. Focus. Resources currently being spent on keeping twenty-two-year-old Bobby Franklin's jaw attached to his skull, instead of being channelled into whatever he actually is underneath. 

He's not just protecting you with his body. He's protecting you with his form. Keeping the familiar shape, the face you trust, the lips you kissed, but keeping all of it intact costs him, bleeds him, divides the vast and ancient thing into a fraction of its true capacity. 

As long as you're here, he will keep wearing Bobby. As long as he's wearing Bobby, Entity X will keep gaining ground.

You’re not his weakness. You’re his ceiling. And as long as you're in this corridor, he will keep hitting that ceiling, and Entity X will keep pushing through it, and the math only ends one way.

“Trust me,” BB says, blood in his mouth, the face slipping. The thing underneath looks at you with an intensity that has nothing to do with age or power but with promise he made you, his hand on your cheek. “Run.”

You grab the notebook.

It's on the floor, knocked from the shelf in the barricade, pages bent, the cover dented. 

You snatch it up. Press it to your chest. The routes are in there. Level 0 to Level 1, Level 1 to the stairwell threshold, the stairwell to the passage threading through Level 2 and opening into the long, dark corridor descending to Level 974. You mapped it. You walked it with BB at your side and his hand at your back, and you marked every turn, every landmark, every shift in the hum that signals a boundary.

You look at BB one more time. On the floor. Bleeding black. The face barely holding. Entity X rising behind him, vast and red and patient, those yellow eyes burning through the dark as it turns to follow you. 

BB snarls, and Entity X’s legs crack beneath it. 

You run.

Through the wrecked sublevel. Into the corridor, into Level 0, your notebook against your chest and your bare feet on the carpet and the sound of the fight erupting behind you. Massive, structural, the sound of two ancient things finally meeting without a ceiling, and you run toward the route you mapped, the path you memorised, and you don't look back.

You run until you can't hear it anymore.

The fight stopped being audible three corridors back; the sounds of two entities tearing each other apart swallowed by the hum. 

What you're running from now is the silence. Weighted silence of a level that’s been breached, holding itself still the way an animal holds still when the predator is too close to outrun. The red light hasn't faded. It pulses occasionally, as if Level 0 itself is wounded and you're running through it.

Your bare feet slap on the carpet, the notebook clutched to your chest. The cover bent, the pages pressed against your sternum. 

You're navigating from memory now, the left fork at the junction where the carpet gets warmer, the right turn at the corridor where the hum drops a semitone, the long stretch past the section with the water-stained ceiling tiles that marks the boundary of BB's inner territory. 

You know this route, walked it with BB multiple times. Traced it in the notebook with blue ink and annotated the landmarks and tested yourself on it in the nest while BB watched with that quiet pride, and the memory of his face—the last time you saw it, cracking, bleeding black, the ancient thing surfacing through the fissures—makes your vision blur and you blink hard and keep running.

The corridor opens up.

You skid to a stop. The junction ahead is the one that leads to the stairwell threshold, the one that drops you into the transitional space between Level 0 and Level 1. 

But that’s not why you stop. You stop because the corridor is full of furniture.

And you know this furniture. The recognition is immediate, physical. The flat-packed shelving units with the Scandinavian labels. The plastic-wrapped headboards stacked against the wall. A dining table, oak veneer, the floor model with the scratch on the left leg where Bobby kicked it once, carrying inventory, and the scratch is there, exactly where it should be. The recognition hits you like a blow because this is Clark's. 

Clark's inventory: the same flatpacks and display pieces you organised on night shifts, labelled in your handwriting, and sorted by vendor into bins.

The Backrooms do this. You know they do. They absorb, they replicate, they pull pieces of the real world through the membrane and deposit them in corridors like driftwood. BB explained it once: the levels aren't separate from reality, they're underneath it, and sometimes the underneath leaks up and the above leaks down and things end up where they don't belong. 

But knowing the mechanics doesn't prepare you for the lurch of seeing Clark's dining table in a yellow corridor, and you press your hand to the wall and breathe. The wall is warm under your palm, and you think of BB, and the thought is a blade, so you keep moving—

Voices.

Entity X's lure would be sourceless, directionless. These voices have a direction. They're coming from ahead and to the left, from the section of the corridor that bends around the stacked flatpacks, and they're real. Human. Layered on top of each other with the particular rhythm of people talking in a confined space, voices bouncing off hard surfaces, and you can hear—

“—I don't care, I'm going down there, let go of—”

“Bobby, stop, you can't just—we don't know what's down there, we don't know if—”

“—came through here, right? Through this wall, through this—whatever the hell this is. If she came through here, maybe she's lost, maybe she's—”

“Bobby. Baby. Listen to me—”

Your feet stop. Your lungs cease functioning. 

Bobby.

Bobby's voice. Real, live, present. Happening right now on the other side of a bend in a corridor that shouldn't exist. 

You'd know Entity X's trick by now, the sourceless quality, the way it comes from everywhere and nowhere. This has a direction. This has Bobby's actual vocal cords behind it. And it sounds different. The tired, dismissive Bobby who said you're being dramatic is gone. This voice is raw. Stripped. A man speaking through gravel, through grief so thorough it's changed the texture of his vocal cords. Desperate in a way Bobby never used to sound because Bobby never used to let himself sound like anything except perfectly at ease.

And the other voice. The woman. Calling him baby.

You step past the wall.

The corridor opens into a wider space. One of the junction rooms, the kind where several hallways converge, and the ceiling is higher, the fluorescents brighter, and the hum is louder because more of Level 0 is accessible from a single point. The flatpack furniture from Clark's store is stacked along the walls. A rope trails across the carpet from the far wall, where the concrete appears to dip into a dark space below.

Clark stands near the rope. Older than you remember. Heavier in the face, the circles under his eyes darker, his work shirt untucked and stained, his hands clenched. He looks terrified and dazed in equal measure. 

And a woman. Young. Dark hair, cut short, slip flops. She's got one hand on Bobby's arm and the other pressed to her own chest, and her face is tight with a fear that hasn't fully landed yet, still hovering in the space between this can't be real and this is real, and I might die.

And Bobby.

Your Bobby.

He's standing in the middle of the junction room with the rope half-tied from his belt and a camera in his hand—of course, even here, even in the impossible, Bobby brought the camera—and he's thinner. 

The crop top hangs differently on him now, looser, the chain at his throat sitting lower against collarbones that are more prominent than they used to be. His face is harder. The softness that used to live at the edges, the boyish quality, the roundness that you used to trace with your fingers in the morning light, is gone. Carved away. What's left is angular, drawn, the face of a man who hasn't been sleeping right for a long time. Who hasn't been eating right, either. 

He’s been doing something to himself, or having something done to him, that has stripped the youth from his bones and left behind this sharpened, hollowed version of the person you loved.

You don't know how long it's been. You don't know what happened to him after you fell through the wall. You just know that the Bobby standing in front of you is not the Bobby you left, and the distance between those two versions is written in the new, foreign angles of his still handsome face.

The woman spots you first.

Her gasp is sharp, bitten off, the sound of a person encountering something that doesn't fit the parameters of what she was prepared for. Her hand tightens on Bobby's arm. Her eyes go wide, and her body shifts. Backwards, behind him, an instinct that tells you everything about their dynamic in a single gesture.

Bobby turns.

For a moment, there's only shocked silence. Bobby stares at you. You stare at Bobby. 

The light buzzes, and the rope trails across the carpet. The woman's hand is on his arm, and Clark's flashlight beam trembles on the floor, and you’re standing ten feet apart in an impossible place, looking at each other for the first time since the doorway, the grunt, and the don't wait up and neither of you breathes.

Bobby's mouth moves. No sound, a rasp of breath. Then, cracking at the edges:

"Baby?"

His voice splinters on the second syllable. Splits open. The word comes out ragged, disbelieving, torn from somewhere deep, and the information—you, standing in a yellow corridor, alive, alive—is too big for his face, and the room.

You don't respond. You can't. Your throat has closed around a sound that won't form. 

You're looking at him. Bobby. Real Bobby. The original. The man whose face you've been kissing on another body for who knows how long, whose voice you've been hearing through borrowed vocal cords, whose edges and angles and scars you've memorised on a copy so perfect you'd almost forgotten there was an original. 

And here he is. Diminished and sharpened, desperate and real, standing in front of you in a crop top and a chain with a camera in his shaking hand, and the distance between you is ten feet, and however long it's been and all the things neither of you said.

Bobby drops the camera.

It hits the carpet with a muted thud. 

Bobby, who’s never let go of a camera voluntarily in his life, who held onto the viewfinder the way other men hold onto control, lets it fall from his fingers like it weighs nothing. Like it was never important, like every hour of footage he ever shot was just a rehearsal for the moment he'd need his hands free to reach for you.

He yanks at the rope around his waist. His fingers are clumsy, frantic, tearing at the knot rather than untying it, his jaw clenched and his breathing coming in short, hard bursts through his nose. The woman takes a step toward him.

“Bobby, wait, you don't know if—”

He doesn't hear her. The rope falls. He steps out of it like stepping out of a skin he doesn't need anymore, and he starts walking toward you. Fast, accelerating, his stride lengthening with each step, his breathing growing more laboured, and the expression on his face is furious. 

At the ten feet of carpet between his body and yours, at whatever he's been through since you vanished, at whatever it cost him, and he’s crossing it with the barely-contained ferocity.

He stops. Three feet from you. Two.

“Fuck,” he whispers, his eyes glassy, red-rimmed. His lashes are wet. Bobby, who doesn't cry in front of people, who presses the heels of his hands into his eyes and grinds the tears back, who’s never once let you see him break, is standing in front of you with tears in his eyes and making no effort to hide them. 

“Fuck,” he says again, softer, cracking, his whole face contorting around the word like it's the only syllable left in his vocabulary. 

He's looking at your face. Scanning every feature the way he used to scan you through the viewfinder, except there's no viewfinder now, no glass, nothing between his eyes and your face, and you can see the exact moment his brain confirms what his body already knows.

It's you. It's really you.

His hand lifts. Shaking. Visibly, violently shaking, the tremor running from his shoulder through his elbow through his wrist through his fingers, and his hand reaches across the two feet of air between you and lands on your shoulder.

You flinch.

Bobby makes a sound. A wrecked, gutted thing. Less than a gasp, more than a breath. His fingers tighten on your shoulder, involuntary, desperate, like he's afraid you'll dissolve if he loosens his grip. His other hand comes up and grabs your other shoulder, and he's holding you at arm's length with both hands, his face falling apart, the composure crumbling, and his voice when it comes out is barely there:

“You're real. God, please, tell me you're real, baby. Tell me this isn't—tell me I'm not—”

You're both breathing hard. Standing in a yellow corridor, his hand on your shoulder. Your body is rigid, his eyes wet as they drink you in, and the woman behind him is watching you both. Clark mumbles his disbelief faintly, and the world reduces to the two feet of air between your body and Bobby’s and all the wreckage on either side.

Bobby whispers your name.

Not baby. Your name. The real one, the full one, spoken so quietly you almost don't hear it, spoken the way you'd speak a word you're afraid will break if you say it too loud. Your name in Bobby's real mouth, the one that kissed you on a Thursday morning and said stay and meant it, and the sound of it cracks you open. 

He throws his arms around you.

Without gentleness, without hesitation. Bobby grabs you with both arms and pulls you into his chest so hard you stumble, your bare feet sliding on the carpet. His arms lock around your back, and his face buries in your neck. He's holding you desperately, with the full-body grip, a man who’s just recovered the thing he was drowning without.

He's warm.

The realisation hits you with a horrible, dizzying vertigo. He's warm. His hands on your shoulders were hot. Searingly, really, shockingly hot after months of BB's cool skin, BB's below-human temperature, the constant slight chill of a body that generates heat only when kissed into producing it. 

Now his whole body is pressed against yours, and he’s a furnace. Metabolic, organic, almost unbearable. The heat of blood moving through capillaries, of a heart pumping in a chest that rises and falls because it has to, because it will stop if it doesn't. He smells like soap. Faintly. Under that, sweat. Actual sweat, the salt-and-skin smell of a human body under stress. 

And underneath that, barely there, weed. Like he smoked before coming down here. Like Bobby needed his hands to stop shaking long enough to hold the camera, and the specificity of it, the humanness of it, the biochemical reality of a man who self-medicates his anxiety with marijuana and has done it since he was nineteen, is so overwhelmingly, violently real that your knees buckle.

You cling to him. 

Your arms come up—late, delayed, your body catching up to the fact that this is happening—and your fingers grab fistfuls of his shirt, and you hold on. He holds on too, and you're both shaking. Both gasping, making sounds that aren't words at the sheer impossibility of it all. 

Just grief and relief and terror and love, suddenly all the same thing. 

Bobby's hand is on the back of your head, pressing your face into his neck, and his chest is heaving, his pulse hammering against your cheek, and he's alive, he's alive, he came for you, he found the wall, and he came through, and he's here and—

“Bobby?”

The woman's voice. Small. Wary. She's standing behind Bobby with her arms wrapped around herself and her face pinched with confusion, frightened, and underneath both of those, a hurt she's trying very hard not to let surface. She's staring at you. At your head, pressed into Bobby's neck. At Bobby's arms around you, locked, total. 

The way he's holding you like the building could come down, and he wouldn't let go.

Bobby pulls back. Only his head, only enough to see your face. His hands come up and cup your jaw, framing your face the way he used to frame shots, and his thumbs trace your cheekbones and his eyes drag over your features with the starving hunger.

“You're alive,” Bobby says hoarsely, his thumbs on your cheekbones and his eyes bright. “You're alive. I thought—the tapes, they went blank, they all went—I thought you were—fuck, you're alive. I missed so fucking much—"

The lights go red.

A sudden, total shift. Every fluorescent in the junction room snaps from yellow to deep crimson in the space of a single heartbeat, and the hum screams. A high, keening frequency that's less sound and more pressure, a vibration that pushes against your eardrums again and fills your skull. An alarm. Organic, not mechanical. 

The level itself shrieks, Level 0 responding to a breach so severe that its entire frequency is destabilising.

You know this sound, know what it means. Your body knows before your brain catches up. The red means Entity X. The alarm means the fight has moved, or ended, or escalated beyond what the level can contain. The walls are wrong, and the carpet under your feet is vibrating with a frequency you've never felt before, and every nerve in your body is firing the same message: move.

You grab Bobby's hand. Hard. Your fingers lacing through his.

“Come with me. Right now.”

“What—what is that, what's happen—”

“Right now, Bobby.”

The woman closes the distance. She's been standing behind him, arms wrapped around herself, but the alarm has shaken her forward, adrenaline overriding the hurt on her face, and she grabs Bobby's other arm with both hands.

“Bobby is not going anywhere," she insists, her voice steady. Tighter than her face. “We came here together, and we're leaving together—back through the wall, not deeper into—”

You look at her. Really look at her for the first time. Dark hair. Round jaw. Pretty in a girl-next-door way. You focus on the way she holds Bobby’s arm, the way she positions herself behind him, and remember the baby she called earlier. You see it, and something cold slides between your ribs and sits there.

“Who are you?” you ask flatly.

Bobby's hand tightens in yours. “She's—this is Kat, she works at—”

A scream splits the corridor.

Not human. Long, oscillating, rising in pitch until it hits a frequency that makes the flatpack shelving units rattle against the walls. Howler. Close. Moving fast, drawn by the alarm the way predators are drawn by distress signals, and the sound of it snaps through the junction room like a whip.

“If you want to live,” you begin, your voice dropping into a register you didn't know you owned, calm, flat, cold, the voice of a woman who’s mapped multiple levels and catalogued fifty-three entity types and survived— “you'll follow me. Now.”

You pull Bobby. Bobby grabs Kat, and you move.

You lead them the only way you know how. By the notebook, by the months of repetition and documentation. 

You check each junction against the layout in your head, cross-referencing the hum's pitch and the angle of the corridor walls. Left at the warm patch. Right at the stain. Down the corridor, where the ceiling drops by three inches and the air smells damp. Through the threshold that shifts from carpet to tile and tile to the stairwell that descends between levels.

Bobby is behind you. His hand in yours. He won't let go. His grip is crushing, his callused fingers locked around your palm with a force that will leave bruises, and every few steps, his thumb moves against your wrist. Some involuntary check, a pulse-read, confirming you're still there, still solid, still real.

“How long have you been here?” he asks. Moving fast, breathing hard, his voice pitched low. The camera is gone. Left on the carpet in the junction room, the first time Bobby has abandoned a camera since he was a boy. “How did you—are you hurt? Are you okay?”

“I'm fine.”

“You're not fine, you're barefoot in a—what is this place? Where are we?”

You work your jaw, scanning ahead to escape the storm of warring emotions in your chest. “Keep moving.”

“Baby—”

“Don't call me that.”

The words leave your mouth before you can catch them. Sharp. Reflexive. A flinch turned verbal. 

Bobby's hand tightens on yours, and you feel the impact of the words travel through his grip like a current. A brief, rigid shock, a stiffening of the fingers.

You keep walking. The stairwell descends. Kat is behind Bobby, her hand on the back of his shirt, her breathing ragged, her head on a swivel. She's terrified. You can hear it in the quality of her breath. Short, high, the particular arrhythmia of a nervous system running on pure cortisol. But she's moving. She's keeping up. She hasn't frozen up. 

Some distant, clinical part of you notes this with grudging respect.

Through Level 2. The dripping pipes and the dark. Bobby pulls Kat closer as the dripping grows louder and the shadows lengthen. Something in the walls makes a sound like breathing, and you watch him do it from the corner of your eye—watch his hand find her shoulder, watch his body angle between her and the dark—and the cold thing between your ribs turns over.

Through the transitional corridor. Down. The air changes again. Warmer, sweeter, carrying the faint smell of grass and dust, the signature of the levels that sit closer to the organic stratum. You check the notebook. Page thirty-seven. The route to 974.

Bobby is watching you. You can feel his eyes on the back of your head, on your bare feet, on the notebook clutched in your hand. On the way you navigate this impossible place with confidence. You feel him putting pieces together. That you’ve been here long enough to stop being lost. Long enough to have a system. To have bare feet, which means long enough to have stopped expecting to leave.

“You know this place,” he says. Not a question. His voice is careful, testing, wariness of someone who’s assembling a picture he doesn't want to see. “You've been—you've been here this whole time?”

“Yes.”

“Eighteen months?”

You pause. “Is that how long it's been?”

The silence behind you is devastating. Bobby's thumb stops its circuit on your wrist. Kat makes a small, wounded sound of realisation. If she wasn’t sure who you were before, she is now. 

“You didn't know,” Bobby says quietly. “You didn't know how long.”

You keep walking. The corridor opens up, the air changing again. A final threshold, a shift in the hum, and the space ahead brightens. Not with fluorescent light but something softer, golden. 

Scent of freshly cut grass, old wood and sugar fills your nose, followed by the particular mustiness of a house that’s been lived in by a being both patient and old for a very long time.

Level 974.

Mr Kitty appears at once.

One moment, the entrance to 974 is empty. The amber light, the corridor opening onto a landscape of gently rolling hills and scattered structures, some of them painted in colours too cheerful for the Backrooms, pinks and pastels that shouldn't survive down here. 

The next moment, he's there. Tall. Black. A humanoid shape standing in the centre of the path, its skin the deep, light-absorbing matte of a body that exists as a silhouette even in full illumination. It has no face. The surface where features should be is smooth, blank, and featureless, but the blankness differs from that of Entity X. 

Where Entity X's facelessness was a threat, a void, a surface that peeled open to reveal burning eyes, Mr Kitty's is gentle. Calm. The blankness of a thing that doesn't need a face because its presence communicates everything a face would. It stands with its long arms at its sides, and its smooth head tilted toward your group, its posture radiating patience the way the hum radiates sound.

Kat screams.

A sharp, bitten-off shriek at the wrongness of it, the too-tall body, the faceless head, the quality of ancient, unhurried presence that radiates from it. The scream bounces off the corridor behind you and fades into the amber light.

Bobby jerks to action. Reflex, instinct, the hardwired response to protect the person behind him. He steps in front of Kat, his arm sweeping back to push her behind his body, his jaw set and his eyes wide. His other hand still grips yours so tightly the bones grind together. 

His body is a wall between her and the threat, and the positioning is automatic, total, the posture of a man who does this without thinking.

Your stomach hollows out.

A different emptiness than fear. A cavity that opens beneath your ribs and fills with something cold and acidic. You watch Bobby shield Kat with his body the way he should have shielded you, the way you wished he would have shielded you, the way you spent months standing in doorways wishing he'd turn around and step toward you and put himself between you and anything at all. 

And he's doing it now. For her. The reflexive, unthinking protectiveness he could never perform for you when it was you who needed it. The muscle he let atrophy while you were his has somehow been rebuilt for someone else.

“It's okay,” you say, and your voice comes out even. Controlled. The cold thing behind your ribs makes your words clear. “He won't hurt you. He's safe.”

“He?” Bobby stares at the figure. The figure's blank face turns toward him. Bobby's hand tightens on yours.

“Mr Kitty.” You step forward. The tall, dark shape inclines its head toward you. A brief, acknowledging tilt, the gesture of a being that knows you and has been expecting you. “I need your help. Entity X breached the sublevel. BB is fighting it. I need—”

I'm aware.

The voice arrives inside your skull. A warm, dense pressure that fills the space behind your eyes and settles into your thoughts like sediment into still water. Mr Kitty's blank face is angled toward yours. The stillness radiating from him is calm. Steady. 

The disturbance registered across many levels. The barrier on Level 0 has been partially compromised. Your boy is still engaged.

Your stomach knots. “Is he winning?”

That depends on your definition.

“Is he alive?”

A pause. Mr Kitty's blank head inclines slightly, a gesture you've come to read as contemplation. He does not die the way you understand dying. But he is diminished. The sustained engagement is costly. The red one first used other entities to weaken him.

“Can we use your house? I need to get them somewhere safe.” Your voice catches. “Please. Just…”

Follow the path, little one. You’ll see it in the distance. I need to check the perimeter first. It’s chaos out there. Something else might slip through. 

You nod, gratitude plain on your face. Bobby and Kat are staring at you with matching expressions of blank, dissociated horror when you turn to them. 

“You were talking to it,” Bobby blurts out, flat with disbelief when Mr Kitty flickers out of sight. "You were having a conversation with a faceless thing. What the fuck.”

“It's complicated,” you mutter. “Follow me. Quickly.”

You lead them up the path. The amber light is steady here, warm and sourceless, and the hills roll gently toward a cluster of structures. 

Houses, loosely, buildings with doors and windows and roofs that approximate the concept of dwelling in the way the Backrooms approximate everything. Close enough to function but underlaid with a wrongness that only registers if you look too long. The second structure on the right is small. Wooden. A porch with a rocking chair. 

The door opens when you touch it, and the inside smells like dust and old paper and tea and the particular warmth of a house that is, impossibly, safe.

Mr Kitty is already inside. Standing in the corner of the kitchen, his dark shape nearly touching the ceiling, his long arms folded in front of him with a stillness that radiates patience. The plate of scones sits on the counter beside him.

You usher Bobby and Kat inside. Kat's hands are shaking. Bobby's jaw is tight, and his eyes are moving—scanning the room, the windows, Mr Kitty's dark shape in the corner, you—with the frantic, comprehensive attention of a man who is trying very hard to apply logic to a situation that has left logic behind long ago.

“Sit,” you say. “Eat. Don't touch anything you don't recognise, especially the toys.”

You look behind them. The doorway is empty. The amber path stretches back toward the corridor, quiet.

“Where's Clark?”

Bobby's jaw tightens. He doesn't look at the door. “We got separated. The dark section, with the pipes. Something moved in the walls, and he panicked and ran the wrong direction and I—” He stops. Swallows. The guilt on his face is immediate, reflexive. “I couldn't go after him. I had to keep—I had to keep moving forward."

Kat puts her hand on his arm. “He had the rope. He can follow it back.”

“The rope was tied to me.”

The silence fills the room. You look at the door. Clark is somewhere in the Backrooms, alone, without a map, without a guide, without the months of hard-won knowledge sitting in the notebook pressed to your chest. Clark is somewhere in the dark, and he’s still a man who hired you, who complimented your attention to detail, told you once in an offhand way that seemed to surprise even him that you would’ve made a fine architect, like him. 

“Mr Kitty,” you say, turning toward the entity. “Clark. He's on Level 2. Can you—”

I'm aware. I'll send guidance. The older male is frightened but unharmed. For now.

You cross to the window. The amber light outside is steady. The green hills are quiet. No red in sight. You press your palm flat against the glass and close your eyes, reaching the way BB taught you. Not with your hands but with the part of you that connects to the hum, the part that learned to feel Level 0's frequency like a second heartbeat—

Nothing.

“BB,” you call out. Into the glass and beyond it. “BB, please, answer me. BB?”

Nothing. The window is cold under your hand. He always answers you. Always. From any level, from any distance.

“Who's BB?”

Bobby. Behind you. Standing by the kitchen table, a scone untouched in his hand, watching you with an expression that has shifted from shock to something more complicated. Suspicious, calculating.

You turn back to face the window. “Not now.”

“You just called someone's name into a window. In a house inside a nightmare. I think now is pretty much exactly when.”

“Bobby—”

“Is it a person? Another… another one of those things, like the tall one? Are you with someone down here?” He sets the scone on the table. His frown deepens when you don’t correct him. “What—is he your new boyfriend or something? Does he have a face, at least?”

The laugh that comes out of you is ugly. Short, throaty, carrying a bitterness you didn't know you had room for on top of everything else. You turn from the window, glaring, ignoring the pang of relief, love, and warmth you feel at the sight of him despite it all.

“You don't get to ask me that.”

“I don't get to—I just found you. I've been looking for you for eighteen months. I sat in a basement and talked to a goddamn wall for seven months because I thought—because I hoped— nd you're down here with a name for someone and—”

“And what, Bobby? What were you doing while you were sitting in that basement? Because it looks like you were doing pretty well.” Your eyes cut to Kat, who’s standing by the counter with a scone in her hand and her face pinched still. “Looks like you bounced back just fine.”

The room goes quiet. 

Bobby stares at you. The hurt on his face is immediate, unguarded, a direct hit. The flinch he didn't have time to armour against, the naked impact of being told by the woman he's been grieving that his grief wasn't enough. His jaw tightens, eyes hardening.

“You think I bounced back?” Low. Dangerous. Bobby's edge, the blade under the casual, the sharp thing that used to make you go quiet, except right now it's not going to make you go quiet because you’ve spent months in the impossible learning how to not go quiet. “You think—do you have any idea what it was like? You disappeared. You just vanished. No note, no call, no body, nothing. The cops thought I killed you. They hauled me in, sat me down and looked at me like I was something he scraped off his shoe. I sat there, and I took it because what was I gonna say? She up and vanished? The neighbours heard us fighting. Terrence would barely talk to me unless it's about searching for you. People won’t look at me around town. My own mother—”

“Bobby, maybe this isn't the—” Kat starts.

“And the tapes.” Bobby's voice cracks, just slightly. A tiny fracture in the anger and grief. “The tapes went blank. All of them. Every single one. Years of footage and it just—you just—disappeared. From the tapes, from people's memories, from everything. Terrence couldn't remember what you looked like. My mom called you 'Bobby's friend.' Nobody remembered you. Nobody, except me. And I thought I was losing my fucking mind because I could remember and no one else could, and the tapes were blank and you were gone and I had nothing, nothing—”

“I'm sure your new girlfriend was very comforting,” you cut in coolly. “In your grief.”

The words come out serrated. Cruel. You hear them leave your mouth, and you can feel the wrongness of them, the unfairness. This woman is standing three feet away, and you don't know her. You’re aiming your pain at her like a weapon because she's standing next to Bobby and keeping his name in her mouth, and the alternative is aiming the anger at yourself.

Kat's face goes white. Then red. Her hand tightens around the scone, and she sets it down on the counter, carefully, the controlled gesture of a woman who’s choosing her next words carefully.

“I kept him alive,” Kat says. Quiet. Level. A statement of fact delivered with a steady gaze. “When everyone else gave up or thought he was a killer, I was there. Every night. I didn't leave.”

Your mouth compresses into a bloodless line. “How noble.”

“You left.”

“I didn't leave, I—”

“I know, I’m sorry that came out wrong.” Kat's voice doesn't rise. It drops, gets quieter. Gets closer to the bone. “I know something happened to you. Clearly. Since you’re here. I know you didn't choose this. But he didn't know that. He sat in a basement for seven months talking to an empty wall, and then Clark kicked him out, and he sat in a parking lot, screaming at me because he couldn't scream at you, and I stayed. I stayed when everyone else left. So don't stand there and act like I stole something from you. I picked up what you couldn't carry anymore because you weren’t there."

The room vibrates. Not with sound. With the tension of three people, holding pain that doesn't fit. Pain that belongs to eighteen months of separation and misunderstanding and choices made in the dark by people who were all, in their own ways, trying to survive.

Bobby is looking at you. His eyes are red, jaw set, his hands fisted at his sides.

“It took months,” he chokes out. “It took months after Clark kicked me out. Months before—before anything. I was a wreck, and she was kind to me. I pushed her away, and I pushed her away, and I pushed her away, and eventually I—” He swallows thickly. “I had nothing. You were gone. The tapes were gone. And I had to—I had to keep living, baby. I'm sorry. I'm sorry that I kept living.”

“I'm sure it was very hard," you bite out coldly. “Having to move on after seven whole months.”

“Seven months of sitting on a concrete floor talking to you.” Bobby takes a step toward you. His voice rising now, the anger competing with the grief, both of them pushing through the cracks in his face. “Seven months of bringing you coffee, your order, every night, and pouring it down the drain at two in the morning because you weren't there to drink it. Seven months of sleeping on your side of the bed because it still smelled like you for the first three weeks, and then it didn't, and that was worse. Seven months of saying I love you to a wall, night after night after night, and the wall never answered. So yeah. Yeah, it was hard. Sorry, it wasn't long enough for you.”

“Then maybe you should have told me you loved me before I disappeared.”

The words come out cold. A scalpel drawn across the exact right vein, delivered with a fury so controlled it's almost calm, practically a snarl. Your jaw sits tight, and your eyes burn, voice carrying the compressed weight of every night you lay three feet from Bobby in the dark and wondered if you were still visible.

“Maybe if you'd said it once—” Your voice cracks. Splits. Your anger rises like bile, flooding your throat, and you can feel it. The rage, the one BB heard through the wall, the one you buried under self-doubt and swallowed until it poisoned you. It's here. Right here. Pressing against your teeth, trying to get out. “Maybe if you'd just—maybe—”

You stop.

Your jaw clamps shut, your hands fisted at your sides. You can feel the anger writhing in your chest, trying to claw its way up your throat, and you swallow it. Again. The way you've always swallowed it. Push it down. Fold it in. Turn it inward because the alternative is letting it out, and if you let it out, you don't know what might happen, you don't know what it might burn down, you don't know—

In the corner of the room, Mr Kitty tips his head.

A slow, measured tilt. His blank face angling toward you with a quality of attention that's different from his usual patient stillness. Then the moment passes, and Mr Kitty's head straightens again. 

Bobby is staring at you. The anger on his face has fractured. What's underneath it is worse. Hurt, raw and exposed. Kat stands at the counter behind him with her arms crossed and her face closed. The hurt she's refusing to show bleeds through anyway, visible in the set of her mouth and the brightness of her dark eyes.

You're about to speak. The words are loaded, chambered, aimed—the doorway, the grunt, the don't wait up, the months of feeling like furniture in your shared apartment and now learning it took him seven whole months of dramatic wall-performances before he found a fucking replacement—

And then you hear what he said.

You hear it. Underneath the anger, underneath the accusations. The specific, factual content buried in the grief.

Seven months of sitting on a concrete floor talking to you.

The basement. Clark's basement. The storage level, the concrete floor, and the wall that breathes. 

Bobby sat in the basement and talked to the wall you fell through. For seven months. Talked to you, through the wall, the same wall that separates the real world from the Backrooms, the same wall that BB sat on the other side of and listened through. BB heard you through the wall. That's what he told you himself. I heard you. From the other side.

If BB heard you through the wall, then BB heard Bobby, too. Bobby's voice, Bobby's grief, Bobby's confessions and apologies poured into concrete for seven months. BB heard a man sitting on the other side of the wall begging you to come back, searching for you, refusing to give up.

BB heard all of it.

BB knew Bobby was looking for you. Knew Bobby loved you. Bobby was sitting three inches of concrete away from the woman BB was holding in the dark, and BB said nothing. BB held you while you cried about Bobby's indifference, and he said it was never you, it was his malfunction, and he knew (he knew) that Bobby was on the other side of that wall. 

He chose, deliberately, consciously, with the full weight of whatever passes for his moral compass, to keep that from you.

BB let you believe Bobby didn't care.

BB let you grieve a living man.

And the worst part—the part that makes your vision narrow and your hands shake and something hot and corrosive flood the back of your throat—is that it worked. It worked. 

You grieved Bobby. You swallowed the anger, folded the hurt inward, and accepted BB's version of the story. He got scared and retreated; that's his malfunction, not yours. 

You let it hollow you out, let it carve the space that BB then filled, and the filling felt like love. The forehead kisses. The promise. The apartment he built for you, the bookshelves by colour, the way he learned to dance and to kiss and to hold you through nightmares. All of it—every tenderness, every moment you thought this is what it feels like to be seen, to be loved—was planted in soil he'd poisoned. 

He didn't just withhold information. He cultivated your grief. He let the hurt grow until it choked out everything else, until Bobby was a wound instead of a person, until you stopped hoping for the door back because what was the point of a door that opened onto a man who didn't love you?

Except Bobby loved you. Bobby loved you the whole time. He loved you so much he sat on a concrete floor for seven months saying it to a wall that wouldn't answer and BB was on the other side of that wall listening and he heard every word and he held your face and said how odd and kissed your forehead and never once, not once, said he's looking for you, he's right there, he hasn't stopped.

The realisation doesn't land like a blow. It lands like a floor giving way. Every tender moment. Every I heard you and nobody else did. Every forehead kiss, every promise, every night in the nest with his cool hand on your back and his hum in your bones. 

All of it built on an omission so vast it restructures everything it touches.

You want to scream. Want to put your fist through the window of this safe house and scream BB's name into the amber light and demand—demand—that he explain himself, that he look at you with those borrowed eyes and tell you why. 

Why did he let you believe you were forgotten? Why did he let you ache for a man who was aching back, three inches of concrete and a universe apart, both of you reaching for each other in the dark while the thing between you held you close and said I've got you, baby, nothing touches you.

Nothing touches you. Because BB made sure nothing reached you. Not even the truth.

Part of you—small, stubborn, lodged behind your ribs like a splinter—whispers that he did it because he loves you. 

That the omission wasn't deliberate cruelty but desperation. That BB heard Bobby through the wall and understood, with the clarity of a thing that’s never been loved or chosen, that the truth would take you away from him. That the choice was between honesty and losing the only person who ever said his name kindly. And the whisper sounds like BB’s voice, and it sounds like the hum. It makes your eyes burn because you understand desperation and loneliness, you understand choosing wrong because the right choice is unbearable—isn't that exactly what Bobby did? What you did by choosing to stay? 

Isn't that the whole stupid, devastating circle? Bobby loved you and showed it by looking away. BB loved you and showed it by keeping you blind.

The whisper doesn't survive the inferno in your chest.

He knew. He knew. And he kept you anyway.

Your mouth opens. The questions forming on your tongue, taking shape, gaining mass—

A crack splits the room. Structural, not sonic. The walls of the house shudder. The windows fracture, the glass spiderwebbing from the centre to the frame in a pattern that resembles stress lines. Kat screams, a sharp, yelping sound. Mr Kitty straightens to his full height, his dark shape pressing against the ceiling, his blank face oriented toward the source of the disturbance with a sudden, absolute alertness.

Bobby is wrenched forward.

One second, he's standing by the kitchen table. The next he's airborne, yanked off his feet by a force that crosses the room faster than sight, faster than the sound that follows it. A percussive boom that blows the scones off the counter and knocks Kat sideways. 

Bobby slams into the far wall, and the wall cracks behind him. He's pinned there, three feet off the ground, his feet dangling, his hands clawing at the thing around his throat.

BB's hand.

BB is in the room. Not entered, arrived, the air displacing around his sudden presence with a pressure change you feel in your sinuses. 

He's holding Bobby against the wall by the throat, one-handed, arm extended, and the face he's wearing is Bobby's face, but it's not—it's wrong, more animal than human, the features sharpened past recognition, the jaw too wide, the teeth visible behind lips that have pulled back in a snarl that doesn't belong on any human mouth. His eyes are black. Fully black. The fissures from the fight are still visible, tiny cracks radiating from his jaw and cheekbones, leaking that colourless light, the mask of Bobby held together by fury and will and nothing else.

One arm hangs at an angle that isn't right. Dark, viscous blood streaks his chest, his neck, his hair. The crop top is torn. The chain is broken, hanging from one side of his throat. He looks like he walked through a war to get here, and the war isn't over; it's just been put on pause long enough for him to cross the Backrooms and find the one thing in his territory that doesn't belong.

Bobby chokes. His feet kick. His hands grab BB's wrist, but BB doesn't move, doesn't register the resistance, a marble statue with a throat in its hand.

BB leans in. Close. His face inches from Bobby's, the original and the copy, face to face at last, the man and the thing that chose his face. Bobby's eyes are wide, bulging, filled with a terror that’s different from any terror he’s ever felt because he’s looking into his own features and finding nothing human behind them.

BB bares his bloodied teeth, snarling low in his chest. 

“How dare you be here?”

It was on the kitchen island, anchored under the weighted base of the baby monitor. The monitor’s screen was on, showing the grainy night-vision image of Maekar still sleeping peacefully. And on a sheet of paper torn from the magnetic notepad stuck to the fridge, the one you used for grocery lists, for pediatrician appointment reminders, was your handwriting.

I’ve taken a project abroad. I don’t know when I’ll be back. The baby is fed. I’m sorry.

No signature. No love. Just four sentences, the last two practical, the first one a lie.

A project abroad.

You hadn’t worked in over a year. You’d been forced to quit your job at eight weeks pregnant, laid flat by hyperemesis so severe you’d lost fifteen pounds before the second trimester. You’d cried when you submitted your resignation, not because you loved the work - fintech compliance, a job you described as “soul-crushingly boring but mine”, but because it was yours. Your career. Your independence. The thing you’d built while he was being handed vice presidencies in the family empire like party favors.

He’d offered, so many times, to help. To make calls. His father could have had you in a C-suite by Monday, his sister had connections at every major bank, there were strings he could pull with a single text message. And every time, you’d refused.

I don’t want it to be a holdover, you’d said, curled on the bathroom floor between bouts of vomiting, your voice raw. I don’t want my entire life to be a footnote in the Targaryen family ledger.

He’d argued, of course. He was a Targaryen; arguing was constitutional. But you’d held firm, the way you held firm about everything that mattered. The apartment. Your own apartment, a modest two-bedroom in a neighborhood his father had never heard of, paid for with your own money before the wedding. I need a place that’s mine, you’d said. Not an escape hatch. Just…mine.

He’d thought it was romantic at the time, this fierce independence, this refusal to be subsumed. He’d loved it about you. Loved that you weren’t impressed by the family name, that you called his father “Mr. Targaryen” with just enough irony to make Aerion grin, that you’d once described the Iron Throne, the actual multi-billion-dollar corporate headquarters he was supposed to inherit one day, as “aggressively phallic architecture.”

He’d loved it.

He’d loved it, and he’d missed every warning sign it was turning into something else.

The baby monitor let out a soft crackle as Maekar shifted in his sleep. Aerion looked at the screen, then at the note, then at the empty space on the kitchen counter where your laptop used to live.

He called your apartment. The one you’d kept, the one he’d teased you about, calling it the world’s most expensive storage unit. It rang until the building’s generic voicemail picked up. He hung up and called your mother.

“Aerion?” Her voice was surprised but warm. “Is everything alright? It’s late.”

He opened his mouth to ask if she’d heard from you, and then closed it. Because if you hadn’t told her, he didn’t want to be the one to frame this narrative. His wife left him. Left their son. Packed her things and disappeared while he was in another country, shaking hands and making deals, sending you texts you hadn’t answered for the last day of his trip. He’d thought you were tired. He’d thought you needed rest.

He’d known, on some level he was still too cowardly to examine, that you were not alright. Had known it for months. Maybe longer. The way your smiles had become performances, the way you flinched when he touched your shoulder unexpectedly, the way you’d started asking for the precise time his flights would land, the exact minute he’d walk through the door. He’d thought it was love, that meticulous accounting of his time. He’d thought it meant you missed him.

“Aerion?” your mother prompted.

“Sorry,” he said, and his voice came out steady, because he’d been trained since childhood to sound steady even when the ground was liquifying beneath his feet. “Wrong number. So sorry to disturb you.”

He ended the call before she could respond.

The first week was the hardest, and not for the reasons he’d expected.

He’d expected fury. Rage was a familiar landscape; he’d grown up in its shadow and its light, the Targaryen temper that burned hot and fast and left ash in its wake. But fury never came. What came instead was a hollow, scooping emptiness, like someone had reached into his chest and removed something vital, leaving the rest of his organs to shift around the space where it had been.

He didn’t tell his family.

He called his office and said there was a family matter, he’d be working remotely for the foreseeable future. His assistant, a terrifyingly efficient woman who had been with the company longer than Aerion had been alive, said “Of course, Mr. Targaryen” in a tone that suggested she knew more than she was saying and would take it to her grave.

He stayed in the apartment. Your apartment. Yours, not his, though he’d lived there for three years now. He’d never really thought about that distinction before, the way the space was yours even when he occupied it, the way the deed had your name on it in clean black ink. Not his. Never his. He was a guest here, and now he was a guest alone with an eight-month-old baby who didn’t understand why his mother had stopped existing.

The nanny came. Her name was Elena, a soft-handed woman in her fifties who had raised four children of her own and never flinched at anything, not even the day Maekar had a blowout so spectacular it had required a bath, a change of clothes, and the complete sanitization of the changing table. Aerion had asked her to come more often that first week, and she had, her dark eyes flicking around the apartment without comment, taking in the absence of you without asking a single question. He was pathetically grateful for that.

But he didn’t leave Maekar with her entirely. He couldn’t. Some part of him was terrified that if he let the baby out of his sight, he would disappear too, would vanish into whatever void had swallowed you. So he learned.

He learned how to mix formula at three in the morning, squinting at the instructions under the dim light of the range hood. The first few nights, he got the ratio wrong, and Maekar screamed with a fury disproportionate to his tiny body, and Aerion stood in the kitchen holding a bottle that was slightly too warm, slightly too watery, and felt like the most incompetent person who had ever lived.

He learned the difference between a hungry cry and a tired cry and the particular shriek that meant I have a wet diaper and I am personally offended by this. He learned that Maekar liked to be held facing outward, one tiny fist gripping Aerion’s thumb, so he could survey his kingdom with the imperious expression all Targaryens seemed to be born with. He learned the exact bounce-and-sway rhythm that would coax his son from fussing into sleep, a movement that made his lower back ache and his heart do something complicated.

He talked to the baby constantly. It started as a way to fill the silence, which otherwise threatened to swallow him whole.

“Your mother,” he said one night, pacing the nursery with Maekar drowsy against his shoulder, “is the most stubborn person I have ever met. And I grew up with my sister Daella, so that is a competitive field.”

Maekar made a soft sound, somewhere between a coo and a sigh.

“She once refused to speak to me for three days because I suggested she might enjoy a position at a hedge fund. Three days. We were already engaged at that point. I had to grovel. Me. Groveling.” He shifted the baby to his other shoulder. “I was terrible at it. Not enough practice. You should learn to grovel early, it’s a useful skill. I’ll teach you. Provided you don’t disappear on me too.”

The words came out rawer than he’d intended. Maekar, oblivious, drooled onto the collar of his shirt.

“She’ll come back,” Aerion said, to the baby, to the night, to the empty apartment. “She just needs space. A break. She’s been…tired. You’re a lot of work, you know. Worth it, but a lot of work. And she carried you for nine months, and she was so sick, and I don’t think she ever really…” He trailed off.

I don’t think she ever really recovered, he didn’t say. Because that would be an admission. That would be saying aloud that he’d watched his wife drowning and hadn’t thrown a life preserver, just stood on the shore and assumed she’d remember how to swim.

The second week, he found the folder.

He was looking for the pediatrician’s number, Elena had asked, and he’d realized he had no idea where you kept the medical records, when he came across a manila folder tucked between the baby books on the shelf. Inside were printouts. Articles about postpartum depression. Postpartum anxiety. Postpartum psychosis. A checklist of symptoms, some of them circled in your handwriting: persistent sadness, loss of interest, difficulty bonding, intrusive thoughts, feeling overwhelmed, feeling like you’re not yourself.

At the bottom of the folder was a brochure for a maternal mental health clinic. The appointment date on the back was three months ago.

He stared at it for a long time.

He thought about you at three in the morning, nursing a baby who wouldn’t latch, your face exhausted. He thought about how you’d stopped laughing at his jokes. He thought about how you’d flinched when he touched you, and how he’d stopped touching you, and how that distance had become a chasm neither of you seemed able to cross. He thought about the business trip he’d taken when Maekar was three weeks old, and the one at two months, and the one at five months, and how you’d asked each time for his exact itinerary, his flight numbers, the moment he’d be back.

He’d thought you were being thorough, organized. The same way you’d been organized about the engagement party seating chart and the wedding guest list and the nursery color scheme.

He’d been so, so stupid.

“I found your folder,” he said to the empty apartment. He was standing in the kitchen, the brochure in his hand. Outside, the city hummed with the sound of early evening traffic, everyone going home to their families, their lives intact. “The one about postpartum depression. You had an appointment. Did you go?”

Silence.

“Did you go, and it didn’t help? Or did you not go at all? Were you scared? I would have come with you. I would have…” He stopped. His voice had cracked.

He was a Targaryen. Targaryens did not crack.

He sat down on the kitchen floor, his back against the cabinets, and called you again. Voicemail. Your voice, still bright, still professional, still so perfectly fine. He hung up and called again just to hear it.

“I’m sorry,” he said after the beep. “I don’t know what I did, or didn’t do, but I’m sorry. Please. Just call me. Just tell me you’re alive. I don’t need you to come back, I don’t need you to…just tell me you’re okay. Please.”

He didn’t send it. He deleted the message and recorded another one.

“It’s me. I’m home. The baby’s fine. He’s started doing this thing where he scrunches up his face before he sneezes, it’s…you’d laugh. I hope you’d laugh. I hope you’re somewhere safe.” A pause. “I’m not coming after you. I won’t. If you needed to leave, if you needed to get away from…from me, from this, from everything, I won’t hunt you down. Just…a sign. A text. Anything. So I know you’re breathing.”

He sent that one. Then he sat on the kitchen floor until his legs went numb and Maekar woke up crying for his midnight bottle.

The third week, he took the baby to the park.

It seemed like the kind of thing a competent parent would do. Elena had the day off, he’d insisted, she’d argued, he’d won, or maybe she’d let him win because she could see he was two bad nights away from a complete breakdown, and the apartment walls were closing in.

He strapped Maekar into the stroller, a contraption that cost more than some people’s monthly rent and that you had spent three weeks researching before purchasing. If I’m going to push a tiny human around for the next three years, I want it to have good suspension, you’d said, and he’d laughed and kissed your forehead and said you could have whatever stroller you wanted, whatever made you happy, whatever you needed.

He’d thought that was enough. Saying yes. Giving you whatever you asked for.

He hadn’t noticed you’d stopped asking.

The park was crowded with families, children shrieking on the playground, parents slumped on benches clutching coffee cups. Aerion felt spectacularly out of place in his cashmere sweater and Italian leather shoes, pushing a stroller that probably cost more than the playground equipment. A woman with a toddler on her hip gave him a curious look, and he realized he was muttering.

“Sorry,” he said, and then didn’t know why he was apologizing.

He found a bench in a quiet corner, near a patch of flowers that had seen better days, and lifted Maekar out of the stroller. The baby blinked in the sunlight, his eyes the pale almost-purple that ran in the family, and grabbed for Aerion’s nose.

“No, that’s attached,” Aerion said, gently detaching the tiny fingers. “How about we look at the flowers instead?”

Maekar was not interested in the flowers. He was interested in Aerion’s watch, which he grabbed with both hands and attempted to shove into his mouth.

“That’s worth more than your nanny’s annual salary, do not put it in your mouth.” Aerion extracted the watch. Maekar’s face crumpled. “No, don’t...here, here, take my finger. Chew on my finger. Everyone chews on my finger lately.”

The baby gnawed contentedly on his index finger, and Aerion felt something shift in his chest. Something painful and warm. He was holding his son in a public park, alone, with no idea where his wife was or when she was coming back or if she was coming back, and he was somehow, improbably, doing okay.

Not well. Not good. Just…okay. The okay of a man who had learned to function on four hours of sleep. The okay of someone holding himself together with sheer force of will and the desperate, pathetic hope that if he just kept going, if he just stayed here, if he didn’t go back to the family estate and admit defeat, you might come home.

“Your mother has an apartment,” he told Maekar, who was not listening. “Did I ever tell you that? She bought it before we were married. Said she needed somewhere that was hers. I didn’t understand it at first. I grew up with everything handed to me, and anything I didn’t have, I just…took or asked for or demanded.” He shifted the baby on his lap. “But your mother, she needed to make things. Build them. Her career, her home, her life. She didn’t want to be a Targaryen acquisition. She needed to be her own person before she could be mine.”

He thought about the empty closet. The carefully made bed. The note, which he’d folded and put in his wallet like some kind of tragic token.

“I think I might have been suffocating her,” he said quietly. “Without meaning to. Without noticing. I think she’s been drowning for a long time, and I didn’t see it, because I was too busy…I don’t know. Being a Targaryen. Being busy. Being important.” He said the word like it tasted bad. “And now she’s gone and I’m here, and I’m coming to the deeply uncomfortable realization that I don’t actually know how to be a person without her. She was the one who did that. Made me a person. Made me someone who sat on the floor and changed diapers and worried about things that weren’t quarterly reports.”

Maekar pulled his finger out of his mouth and made a questioning sound.

“And before you ask, no, I’m not angry at her. I should be. My father would be apoplectic. Disappearance is not an acceptable exit strategy in the Targaryen family. We prefer dramatic confrontations, ideally in public, ideally with witnesses.” He paused. “But I’m not angry. I’m just...I miss her. That’s it. I miss her so much I can’t breathe, and I don’t know if missing her is enough.”

He didn’t go back to the Targaryen residence. His father called, twice, and Aerion let it go to voicemail. His sister Daella texted: Rumors are flying. Are you both okay? He texted back: We’re fine. Just taking some time. Daella, who had always been able to see through him like glass, sent back a single question mark. He didn’t answer.

Because going back to the estate would mean admitting something had gone wrong. That his wife had left. That the perfect Targaryen heir, the golden son, the one who was supposed to carry the family legacy into the next generation, couldn’t even keep his marriage together. Was it about the marriage? He didn’t know anymore. Maybe it was about something deeper, something that had started before the wedding, before the pregnancy, before the illness that had hollowed you out and left something brittle in its wake.

You’d always been so careful to maintain yourself. Your boundaries. Your space. He’d admired it, that unbreachable core of you that remained yours no matter how close he got. And then the pregnancy had stripped everything away. Your body. Your career. Your energy. Your control. And all he’d done was offer to fix it, offer to pull strings, offer solutions that were really just more ways of absorbing you into the Targaryen machine.

I don’t want it to be a holdover.

He hadn’t understood. He was beginning to.

He spent the fourth week in a strange limbo. Elena came three days a week, and Aerion did conference calls from the kitchen table, Maekar in a bouncer at his feet. The baby had started babbling, a stream of consonants that seemed to contain the secrets of the universe. Aerion talked back. He talked about everything. He talked about how he’d met you at a terrible bar near campus, both of you too overdressed for the venue, how you’d argued about the role of regulation in financial markets and he’d fallen in love with you by the end of the first hour. He talked about the wedding, a small thing that had driven his father to tears of frustration: a Targaryen wedding with only forty guests, Aerion, what will people think, and how you’d worn a suit instead of a dress and looked like the most beautiful thing he’d ever seen.

He talked about the day Maekar was born. How you’d labored for eighteen hours and then needed an emergency C-section, and how the sight of your face, gray with exhaustion and terror, had undone something in him he hadn’t known could be undone.

“I should have been there,” he told the baby one night, rocking him in the dark. “After. I should have stayed home. I should have noticed. She was asking for my flight times because she was terrified. Not because she missed me. Because she was clinging to the schedule, the predictability, the one thing she could control. And I just…left. Every time. Business trip after business trip. I thought I was providing. I thought that’s what a good husband did.”

Maekar was asleep, his mouth slightly open, his head a warm weight against Aerion’s chest.

“I am not a good husband,” Aerion said to the ceiling. “I’m trying to be a good father. I don’t know if I’m succeeding. But I’m trying.”

The message came on a Tuesday, six weeks and two days after he’d found the note on the kitchen counter.

He was making coffee, Maekar propped on his hip, when his phone buzzed. An email. From you.

He almost dropped the baby.

He fumbled the phone open, his heart hammering, and read:

Aerion. I’m alive. I’m safe. I’m getting help. I can’t explain everything yet. I needed to leave before I broke something I couldn’t fix. I didn’t want to break you. I didn’t want to break our son. I’m sorry. I don’t know when I’ll be ready. But I wanted you to know I’m not dead. Please don’t look for me. Please don’t send anyone. I need this. I need to get better. I need to know I can be a person again before I can be a mother or a wife. I know this isn’t fair. I know. I’m sorry.

Don’t let anyone call me a bad mother. I’m not a bad mother. I’m just sick. I’m trying to get well.

Tell Maekar I love him. Tell him every day. Even if he can’t understand it. Especially because he can’t understand it. Tell him his mother loves him, and she’s coming back, she just doesn’t know when.

He read it five times. Then he sat down heavily on the kitchen floor, his back against the cabinets again, Maekar balanced on his lap and reaching for the phone with grabby hands.

“That’s your mother,” Aerion said, his voice strange and cracked. “That’s your mother. She’s alive. She’s getting help. She’s...” He had to stop. His throat had closed up.

Maekar grabbed the phone and tried to put it in his mouth.

Aerion let him. It was waterproof. Supposedly. Then he remembered how you always worried about germs and had to extract it back.

He sat there for a long time, holding his son, the phone getting progressively slimier against his thigh. He thought about calling your mother. He thought about calling his father. He thought about getting in the car and driving to every hotel in the city until he found you, because you’d emailed him, you’d broken your silence, and he could trace the IP, he could hire someone, he could find you in a heartbeat if he wanted.

But you’d asked him not to. You’d said please. And he’d spent too long not listening to what you were actually asking for.

So he didn’t.

He replied instead.

Thank you for telling me you’re alive. I’ve been terrified. Maekar is fine. He’s perfect. He looks like you when he’s about to cry. I tell him about you every day. I’ll keep telling him. I won’t look for you. I won’t send anyone. I’ll be here when you’re ready. I’ll be here. However long it takes. I love you. I’m sorry I didn’t see how much you were hurting. I’m sorry I didn’t help. I’m sorry I left. I’m going to do better. I don’t know how yet. But I’m going to figure it out. Stay safe. Get well. I love you.

He sent it before he could second-guess himself. Then he picked his son up under the armpits and held him at eye level.

“Your mother is coming back,” he said. “I don’t know when. But she’s coming back. And until then, you and I are going to hold down the fort. Can you do that? Can you hold down the fort with me?”

Maekar drooled. It was, Aerion decided, probably an affirmative.

The months that followed were not easy. Nothing about them was easy. There were nights when Maekar woke up every forty minutes for no discernible reason, and Aerion paced the nursery with bloodshot eyes and a running monologue of despair. There were days when the emptiness of the apartment was pressing down on him until he could barely breathe. There were moments when he almost called his father, almost packed up the baby and the bags and retreated to the estate where nannies and housekeepers and family fixers would descend and make everything smooth and easy and wrong.

But he didn’t.

Because this apartment was yours. This was the place you’d built with him, your own stubbornness, your own need to be something more than a Targaryen footnote. And if he left it, if he gave up and went home, it would be like admitting you were never coming back. It would be like closing the door on something that wasn’t finished yet.

So he stayed.

He learned to cook, badly. He learned to do laundry, and turned half of Maekar’s onesies pink before he figured out the whole separating-colors concept. He learned the names of every pediatrician in a ten-mile radius and the exact temperature at which a baby’s fever required an emergency room visit. He learned that the vacuum cleaner could soothe Maekar to sleep in under five minutes, a discovery that changed his life and also his electricity bill.

He talked to the baby constantly, a stream of consciousness narration that covered everything from stock market fluctuations to the plot of the book he was reading to whatever he remembered of his own childhood, which was mostly cold rooms and colder expectations.

“Your grandfather is not a bad man,” he said one afternoon, sitting on the floor of the nursery while Maekar did tummy time on the play mat. “He’s just…a product of a particular system. Targaryens have been running things for a long time, and we’ve gotten very good at it, and we’ve also gotten very bad at being people. I didn’t realize how bad until I met your mother. She looked at the whole thing: the money, the power, the legacy, and just…wasn’t impressed. It drove me insane. I wanted her to be impressed. I wanted her to think I was worth something.”

Maekar lifted his head, wobbled, and planted his face directly into the mat.

“Exactly my point,” Aerion said. “It’s all just posturing. She saw through it. She always saw through it.”

He thought about the apartment you’d kept, the one that was probably still sitting empty across town, your name on the lease like a declaration of independence. He hadn’t been there since you left. He didn’t have a key. He wasn't welcome. But sometimes, in the quiet moments between feedings and changings and conference calls, he imagined you there. Curled on a couch he’d never seen. Eating takeout from a container. Slowly, painstakingly, remembering who you were.

He hoped you were. Remembering. He hoped it was working. He hoped, with a desperation that had become as familiar as breathing, that you would come back.

And in the meantime, he waited.

He waited through Maekar’s first word, which was “da,” and which Aerion chose to interpret as “dad” rather than the more likely “random syllable.” He waited through first steps, wobbly and triumphant across the living room floor, captured on video he didn’t know if he should send you or not. He waited through the first birthday, a quiet affair with just him and Elena and a cake that Maekar mostly wore rather than ate.

And every night, after he put the baby to bed and the apartment settled into silence, he sat in the kitchen with his phone in his hand and re-read the email you’d sent. I’m getting help. I’m trying to get well. Tell Maekar I love him. He’d memorized it by now, every word, every comma. It was a lifeline. It was a promise.

I’m coming back, you’d said. I just don’t know when.

That was enough. It had to be enough. He would make it be enough, for as long as it took, because you were the one who had taught him how to be a person instead of a Targaryen, and now he was going to be the kind of person who deserved you. Who waited. Who stayed. Who did the work, even when it was hard, even when it was lonely, even when the only witness was an infant who didn’t understand a word he said.

He would be here. When you were ready. Whenever that was.

I’ll be here, he’d written back. And he meant it. Every word.

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.

You reluctantly tear your gaze away, blinking innocently at her with a cheeky grin stretched across your glossy lips.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” 

The subject of your affection moves, and so do you– or at least you attempt to, until Trinity grabs your arm holding you in place.

“Nope, no way– not tonight!” 

You pout, shaking your arm as you try to get her to let go.

“Trin, come on– I’m not going to do anything except talk to him!”

“Talk?” she repeats incredulously, moving to block your distracted gaze from him. “You look like you’re about thirty seconds away from pouncing on him,”

You gasp in faux offense, finally meeting her gaze with your sly one.

“How dare you! I have self control,” 

“I highly doubt that,”

Jack Abbot is leaning against the bar like he doesn’t even realize how much space he takes up in your mind, just by existing. Short sleeves straining over his biceps, on display for anyone to ogle at– his gray curls slightly mussed like he’s run a hand through it one too many times. 

He’s laughing at something Robby is saying, head tipped back just enough for your stomach to twist, the outline of his strong jaw entrancing you further.

“I just know he’s better than in my head,” you sigh out, going back to chew on your straw until your drink is snatched out of your grip. “Hey–” your protests are cut off with one glare.

“You finished it twenty minutes ago,” she shoots back, placing her hands on your shoulders and forcing you to actually face her instead of craning your neck toward the bar and towards the night shift attending. 

You perk up at her words, a mischievous glint forming in your eyes.

“I’ll get us some new drinks then!” you chirp, narrowly avoiding her grip as you wiggle your fingers at her in lieu of a goodbye.

Weaving through the crowded floor, you coincidentally end up right next to Jack by the bar. When he doesn’t notice your arrival, you roll your eyes, before lightly bumping his shoulder.

“Oh my gosh– Doctor Abbot! I didn’t see you there–” you try to sound casual, but it comes out rather breathless instead.

Jack grunts quietly at the impact, before turning around, shoulders dropping when he sees that it’s just you.

“It’s all right,” he reassures you, and then it looks like he’s about to turn back around.

“So!” you exclaim, wincing at the sudden volume of your voice, “Are you having fun?”

He stops mid-turn, then faces you once again, this time fully. You gulp, fighting the urge to check him out when he’s this close to you– looking even more tempting than he does in his usual black scrubs.

Don’t even get me started on the SWAT-uniform–

Jack’s face comes into view as he catches your line of sight again, a soft smirk on his face.

“Am I boring you already?” 

 “No! No, not at all– never, actually– well, not never, but like–” you wave your hands quickly, laughing a little too loudly.

Stop. Talking.

You clamp your mouth shut, and the silence stretches for a moment too long, before you start to scramble sentences together again.

“Anyway! I was just coming to get drinks,” you gesture vaguely to the bar, which you are, in fact, not ordering from.

Jack nods, pursing his lips slightly and you wonder if he’s going to just keep letting you embarrass yourself like this for the entire interaction, or end up taking pity on you and say something.

“Let me buy you a drink–”

“I’ll get you one–”

Your sentences overlap, and you regret the fact that you didn’t take at least one shot before coming over to talk to him. What was your plan in the first place?

 “No, you– you go first,” you gesture toward him, already regretting every life decision that led you here.

Jack studies you for a second, something akin to amusement flickering in his eyes again, like he’s actually starting to enjoy this.

“I was just going to say I’ll buy you one,” he says, nodding toward the bar.

“Right! Yeah– I mean, I was also going to say that. But, like, for you,” you say quickly and trail off nervously, dragging a hand through your hair.

Jack turns slightly toward the bartender, lifting two fingers to signal, then glances back at you. 

“What do you want?”

Your brain, the traitor that it is, short-circuits again, and you spit out the first thing that comes to mind.

“Sex on the beach,”

With him.

“Okay then,” Jack nods, and you swear you saw him stifle a laugh before he turns back to the bartender, voice smooth and low when he orders.

In an urge to try and make up for how incredibly awkward it was and to try and maybe even impress him, you tap your card on the small card reader the bartender placed where you’re standing. Jack blinks, a small frown forming on his face when you beat him to the punch, the sleek, black card in his hand landing on the bar with a clang!

“You didn’t have to do that,” he mutters, eyes narrowed in what looks like offense, like you’d just done something unimaginable.

You smile, waving him off, shoulders rolling back as you try not to let the satisfaction you’re feeling show. 

“It’s okay! I wanted to–”

A loud beep interrupts your sentence, and you watch in horror as the bartender gives you a sad look.

“Sorry Miss, the transaction failed,”

The words cause a wave of embarrassment to wash over you, and you feel your face warming as you let out a laugh, loud and high-pitched.

“That’s– that’s so weird,” you say through silent puffs of air.

You tap it again, and it gives that same, low pitch beeping sound again.

Amazing.

“It declined again–” The bartender quips, like you can’t already see the huge red words on the small screen, and your smile tightens. “Do you maybe have another card?” she asks carefully, eyes flickering between the grip on your card and your eyes– was that unshed tears?

“I– yeah, I mean, I do,” you say, already digging through your bag with way too much urgency. “Somewhere. Probably. I just, hold on–”

You do not have another card.

You know you don’t have another card. What you do have is a lip gloss, three crumpled receipts, a pen that doesn’t work, and your dignity rapidly disintegrating.

The sound of metal clinging breaks you out of your spiraling thoughts, and you look up just in time as Jack taps it, a cheerful ding confirming that it was indeed a lack of funds on your side.

You watch horrified as it goes through immediately. Turning to him immediately, your eyes widen. 

“No! No, you don’t have to, I was literally just about to–”

“Find another card?” he finishes, one brow lifting slightly, then orders for both of you again like nothing happened and you latch onto that small extension of  mercy with your entire being. 

When he turns back, there’s something different in his expression now, still amused, but softer. His hand slides the drink over to you, and you feel your fingers brush against his as you grab the stem of the glass, cursing internally at yourself for also choosing the ugliest, most egregious looking drink on the planet.

“...Thanks,” you mutter in defeat, taking a sad sip from the loopy straw.

Jack lifts his whiskey in silent cheers, mirroring you and taking a sip. You meet his gaze over the rim of his glass, and despite how utterly humiliated you feel, somehow, your stupid heart is racing like it’s still a win, having a drink with Jack Abbot.

Just as you’re about to speak up again, the sound of someone calling his name across the bar breaks the moment, and Jack turns towards the sound, lifting a hand in greeting, then turns back to you.

“Buddy of mine from the army,” he explains, and if you didn’t know any better, you’d almost say he looked regretful. “I should go say hello–”

“Yeah! Totally, that’s…that’s totally fine,” you wave your hands dismissively, practically shooing him away, “Don’t let me keep you, and uh– thanks again for the drink,”

The sooner he leaves, the sooner you can jump over the bar and crush that fucking card reader–

Jack shifts his weight, his eyes flickering down to your lips and the way they move as you chew on the straw and stare behind the bar, before he looks back.

“Anytime,” he responds, not forgetting to place a crisp twenty dollar bill on the table before leaving.

When he disappears into the crowd, your head falls into your hands, a loud groan escaping you.

2. 

“Stupid fucking, piece of shit garbage!” you cry out as your eyes water, feeling that lump in your throat that reveals exactly what’s about to happen next.

Your head thumps against the steering wheel, loud snivels filling the space of your car.

As if your day hadn’t been bad enough, your car chooses right now to break down as well. 

Normally, you’d brush it off and take the bus, but it was as if the sky had opened up and the ocean was falling from it. No warnings on the forecast, so you sure as hell weren't carrying an umbrella around in your bag either. 

Ordering an Uber was out of the question, since the last of your money had just been taken by a mysterious Apple charge you had no way of cancelling– and even if you did, your nine dollars weren’t going to cover the thirty minute long ride fare to your shitty apartment across town. 

Taking a deep breath, you shove your phone into your bag and zip your jacket up– not bothering to try and avoid the rain.

“I hope I drown,” you mutter, the rain pounding down mercilessly on your head, the thin jacket you have on doing nothing to warm you as you waddle across the parking lot and onto the sidewalk.

Within seconds, your hair is plastered to your face, your clothes clinging uncomfortably to your skin as your shoes splash through shallow puddles forming across the cracked asphalt– currently soaking through your socks.

The sound of cars whooshing along the road can be heard, but you keep your head down.

That is until you hear a car pull up to where you’re walking, and a window rolling down as a voice breaks through the loud noise of water rushing.

“What the hell are you doing?”

You squint, blinking through the wet droplets clouding your vision as it focuses on the black truck that’s stopped in the middle of the road.

Sitting there in all his glory is Jack Abbot, a concerned look etched onto his face as he takes in your soaked figure, the way your clothes cling to you and how your shoulders are slumped inwards, like you’re trying to cover yourself, while simultaneously having given up.

Naturally, it had the red flags in his head blaring.

You blink at him like he’s a hallucination. Honestly, with the day you’ve had, it wouldn’t even be that surprising if he was one.

“What does it look like I’m doing?” you shout back over the rain, your voice wobbling despite your attempt at sarcasm, your arms crossing as you another gust of wind blows.

“It looks like you’ve lost your mind,” he says dryly, and it almost sounds like he’s concerned for you, already reaching across to shove the passenger door open. “Get in–”

“Oh, no– I’m okay, I’m taking the bus–” you shake your head wildly, motioning to the bus stop just right ahead. A car honks, and you see Jack roll his window down, motioning with his hand for it to drive around him, clearly having no plans on pulling away just yet.

“You’re not standing in this, waiting for a bus,” he says, like it’s the most obvious thing in the world. “I can drive you home,”

The cars continue to honk behind him, yet Jack is in no rush to move, still arguing with you through the lowered window.

“I don’t want to, like… inconvenience you,” you try again, even as your teeth start to chatter, completely betraying you. “It’s really not that far and I–”

“Get in the truck,” he drawls, not even turning around anymore when the cars honk, simply waving his hand out of the driver side window and letting them pass.

“You’re causing a traffic jam–” you counter, an uneasy look on your face as you notice multiple people roll their windows down and shout out profanties. You didn’t blame them, you were being unreasonably stubborn, but you couldn’t be alone with him, not when you looked like this and he looked like that.

You also didn’t trust yourself to not start crying when feeling the, what looked like, smooth, expensive seat of his car. The rough cushion of your own wouldn’t even allow you to attempt wearing shorts in the summer while driving. 

“I’m not moving,” he cuts in simply, eyes locked on yours. “So you can either keep walking and make this worse for everyone, or you can get in the car,” 

His voice can barely be heard over the sounds of the horns blaring, and you frown, debating for one more moment before you finally succumb to the pressure, hurrying around the front of the car as he pushes the door open from the inside, watching your drenched form climb inside. 

Once the door closes, the outside noise is cut off, only leaving the sound of the heater and your uneven breathing as you try to stop your shivering. 

You sit there, dripping onto what you now know are very expensive seats, hands hovering awkwardly like you’re afraid to touch anything. Water pools beneath you anyway, completely undoing all your efforts. 

Jack exhales slowly through his nose, one hand tightening on the steering wheel before he reaches over and cranks the heat higher.

“Seat’s already wet,” he mutters, more to himself than you. “You’re not going to make it worse. Sit back,”

You slowly lean back, cringing at the way the leather squeaks under you, hands clasped together in your lap as Jack starts driving.

“Sorry,” you say quietly after a while, staring straight ahead and watching as the windshield wipers work overtime.

“For what?” he says gruffly, glancing at you out of the corner of his eyes. Seeing as your hands are still shaking in your lap, he reaches down, turning the seat warmers on as well.

You shift uncomfortably, shrugging while you start digging in your backpack, pulling your phone out. At least that had managed to stay dry. You really couldn’t afford getting a new phone right now.

“Everything, I think. Shit, you need my address, right–”

“No, I got it,” Jack says, one hand on the steering wheel whilst the other pushes the turn signal indicator, and maneuvers the car smoothly.

“You know my address?” you ask dumbly, head whipping around to look at him. 

Oh my God– this is it! This is your chance, he’s clearly–

“I dropped you, Javadi and Matteo off after the last staff party, remember? It’s still in my navigation,”

You visibly deflate, sinking back into the warm seat as your eyes squeeze shut. 

“Oh. Yeah, I remember that– that was a fun night,”

Getting wasted with your colleagues and faceplanting in front of your crush at the annual PTMC Christmas party was objectively not something you’d recall as being a fun night.

In fact, it was actually the night your inconvenient crush on Jack had started– after he silently bought the entire table a round of drinks, and jokingly gave you a wink when you saw him excuse himself to secretly pay the tab.

The car falls silent as you stare out of the window, lost in your thoughts. Jack looks over again when he notices, watching your damp hair stick to the side of your face, the subtle sniffles you let out every now and then. His hand twitches, the urge to reach over and brush a lock out of your face is strong, but Jack’s willpower is even stronger.

Forcing his gaze back onto the road, his fingers grip the wheel tighter instead, and he clears his throat.

“I thought you had a car?” he asks, hand dropping down to shift the gear stick. 

You smile sheepishly, tucking your hair behind your ear as you look over at him, trying not to stare at his arms flexing at his actions.

“I do. It just decided to give up, and apparently Pittsburgh now has a monsoon season, so,” You motion to yourself and the clammy state you’re in, chest fluttering in something akin to pride when you hear Jack let out a soft huff of laughter.

“And the Uber app happened to give up as well?” he quips back, cocking an eyebrow in your direction.

Your smile drops just as quick and you look down at your hands now twisting in your lap, shrugging.

“No, that was my bank account…again,” you mutter in embarrassment, trying to will the memory of that night in the bar away.

Jack hums in acknowledgment, but doesn’t comment on it any further– your embarrassment is evident in the way your hands are fidgeting, and he fights his instincts once again to stop you from picking on the skin of your nails.

“Do you have my number?” he decides to ask instead, and when you don’t reply he looks over to find you already watching him. When your eyes meet, you snap out of your reverie, fumbling with your phone instead.

“I think so, uh– I can check–” you scroll through your contacts as if you don’t already know and have memorized his number from the day you got it.

“Call me the next time you need a ride,” he cuts in, then just reaches for the radio, low music filling the air for the rest of the drive.

3. 

The rain has settled into a small drizzle by the time Jack reaches your place. 

Unbuckling the belt, you open the door and step out of the car, sheepishly wiping the seat with your sleeve. You had managed to get dry during the ride, but unfortunately, Jack's car had taken the brunt of the damage.

“Hey, no– leave that,” he grumbles, swatting your hand away, and your skin tingles where his hand accidentally brushes it.

A soft laugh escapes you, and you swing your backpack over your shoulder as you stand by the door, shifting on your feet as you prolong the goodbye.

It’s not everyday you get alone time like this, not any day, actually– considering the fact that the night shift attending shockingly only worked the night shift.

“Thanks for the ride,” you mutter shyly, eyes flickering up to meet him. Jack nods, stifling a smile at the sudden bashful look on your face– so unlike your usual loud and boisterous self that he would so often see at handoffs. 

“Don’t forget what I said–”

You roll your eyes, even though your mind is running thousand miles per minute– the thought of casually texting Jack and asking him to pick you up feels awfully domestic to you. 

“Yeah, yeah,” you say absentmindedly, grinning again when he gives you a weak attempt at a stern look. “Alright– okay, I promise,” you concede, and only then does Jack lean back in his seat, looking feeling awfully enamored by the soft, warm version of you he’s getting.

When you finally close the car door and start walking towards the apartment building, you’re stopped by the sight of a large, bulky cardboard box by the entrance. Curiosity takes over, and you quickly take a peek at the name on the waybill, only to freeze once you see that it’s your own.

Shit– you had ordered a new bedframe, but you didn’t think it’d come so soon. Since when does anything ever get shipped on time? Apparently when you’ve already had a crap day, and the one time the elevator is under maintenance. 

Cursing under your breath, there’s not much else you can do than to dig your heels in and try to pull the package– only to get absolutely nowhere.

“What the fuck did they put in here– bricks?” you whine, letting go of it again. Stepping back, your hands land on your hips as you assess the situation. Sighing, you wrap your arms around the large box and pull again, groaning loudly as you do. 

“You just can’t stay out of trouble, huh?”

A yelp escapes you at the sound, letting go of the box and whirling around to find Jack watching you with an amused look on his face.

“I thought you left!” you say breathlessly, stepping away from the package and trying not to show how simply pulling it had knocked the wind out of you.

“I was waiting for you to get inside,” he responds simply, like his words aren’t causing you to shortfunction. 

This entire situation was the reason you tried to deny the ride home in the first place– already feeling mortified over failing to buy him the drink a week ago, to being caught trying to take the bus after yet another monetary issue, and now seeing that you’re unable to even lift a fucking box by yourself.

How on earth were you supposed to convince him that you’re a grown person worth loving and willing to care for him, when you couldn’t even take care of yourself?

“Alright– get the door and I’ll get the–” Jack begins, already moving towards the package. You quickly step in front of him, hands landing on his chest as you stop him, only to quickly drop back at your sides when you realize what you just did, eyes widening.

“No! Sorry– but still, no– I got it. Seriously, you already dropped me off, you don’t need to do this,” you’re borderline pleading at this point, a desperate look on your face. 

You cannot let this man do you any more favors or your chances will officially be flushed down the drain, and he’ll see you as some incompetent woman-child, instead of a potential partner.

Not that your chances were particularly great in the beginning, but at least there was a possibility. Now, each moment you spend in his presence out of work only slims that window of opportunity down further. 

Jack frowns, the lines around his mouth deepening at your words. Stepping around you, he grabs the package, lifting it over his shoulder in one, smooth motion.

You gape at the sight, having just spent the last five minutes pathetically tugging on it, only for him to lift it in seconds.

“That was a lot heavier when I tried to–” you begin, only to realize he’s carrying pounds of furniture on his shoulders and you’re standing there yapping. In an instant, you’re opening the entrance door, watching the muscles in his arms ripple as he grips the box, holding it steady.

“What floor?” he grunts, not bothering to stop walking.

You stumble behind him, swallowing down the drool that's collecting in your mouth. 

You’re pretty sure you had a dream just like this before–

When he glances over his shoulder, you clear your throat, finally answering.

“Second floor,” you say, sounding short of breath despite not doing any of the physical labor.

Watching as he makes his way up the stairs, you bite your lip, glancing at his leg. Surely this was painful, even for someone as fit as him. 

Before you can comment on it, he reaches the second floor, and this time you don’t wait for him to ask, before you’re leading him to your front door.

Thank God you tidied up before heading to work today.

He sets the box down carefully once you guide him inside, rolling his shoulder like it weighed nothing at all. You, on the other hand, are still standing in the doorway like you’ve forgotten how to function in a straight line.

“Where do you want it?” he asks, gaze flitting across your apartment as he takes it in, the warm lighting, the small trinkets and stack of medical books lining the shelves, even the scent being so utterly you that he has to grip the box harder to try and ground himself.

You try not to react at the sight of Jack Abbot in your apartment– looking so out of place yet somehow, right at home.

“Anywhere,” you say, blinking at him.

Jack lets out a low chuckle, leaning the box against the wall as he sees the way you’re looking at him– pupils dilated and unabashedly obvious, even though you always convince yourself you aren’t.

“What?” he huffs, crossing his arms over his chest and tilting his head as he stares back at you, the shoe sized apartment you live in suddenly feeling even smaller.

Shaking your head, you step back, regardless of the already large distance between the two of you. You needed to get further away, maybe even leave the room if possible.

“Thank you,” you say earnestly, swallowing thickly.

Jack realized that he likes seeing you this way, more than he probably should. You depending on him, then wearing that wide eyed, impressed look on your face like he cured cancer, rather than just dropping you home instead of letting you walk through a rainstorm or lifting a fucking box– like he wouldn’t tear the stars from the sky if you asked him to.

Or if you kept looking at him like that.

“You know how to build this thing?” he says instead of any of what he just thought, watching as you fumble with your phone.

“I think so, I saw this tutorial on Tik Tok–” you say, perking up at the thought of finally not having to bother him any longer, only to have your enthusiasm fade away once you see the unimpressed look on his face. 

“What?”

+1

The last piece of your bed-frame is screwed into place, and Jack steps back, hands clasping behind his back as he takes in his work, making sure everything is in the right spot.

God knows you wouldn’t call him to fix it if it wasn’t.

You’re leaning against the doorway, wearing the same guilty expression that’s been on your face since he opened the box and started assembling your bed frame.

“Well? Is it approved?” He jokes, then falters when he sees your face twist as a frown forms on your lips. “Come on, don’t make that face– I wanted to help,” Jack reassures, only for his words to fall to deaf ears. 

“You’ve been constantly helping for weeks,” you mumble defiantly, crossing your arms.

Jack tilts his head, eyebrows raising as he takes note of the slight frustration in your tone of voice.

“And that’s a problem for you?” he provokes, biting back a grin as you fall for it.

“Yes!” you snap, pushing off the doorway and pacing a few steps into the room. “Because it’s always you doing something for me. Driving me around, paying for things, carrying stuff, fixing stuff– ” you gesture at the now fully assembled bed frame like it’s reminding you of what a failure you are.

“Well if it bothers you that much, you can just make up for it,” Jack retorts easily, walking closer to where you’re standing.

You waver, contemplating his words for a minute before looking back at him hesitantly.

“Make it up to you– you’d accept that?” you repeat incredulously, eyes darting across his figure like you’re trying to figure out if he’s being serious or not. 

“Sure,” Jack shrugs, only stopping when he’s right in front of you, looking down at your distrusting face. “Why not?”

“Okay…” you give in, tilting your head up towards him, too focused on what to give him to realize how close you’re currently standing. “What do you want?”

“Nuh-uh,” he tuts playfully, “You’re supposed to come up with it yourself, remember? You don’t want my help–”

“I do!” you spill, running a hand through your hair in distress, “I really do, which is the problem, because if you keep seeing me like this you’ll just feel bad for me, and feel like you need to help me, and I don’t know about you, but I usually don’t end up dating the people I pity–” you ramble, hands moving more frantically with each word you speak.

“Did it ever occur to you that I do this because I want to?” Jack interjects your tangent, lips twitching as he holds back a smile.

Your eyebrows furrow in confusion.

“You do? Why would you–”

Your sentence cuts off when you realize what he’s saying.

Oh.

Oh.

You’d been so caught up in your own feelings that you’d missed the hints he’s been giving since the beginning. Jack Abbot was a kind, patient and responsible guy– and you had clearly overestimated how far he was willing to go to help out platonically.

Jack’s gaze drops briefly to your lips, then back up to your eyes– like he’s giving you time, like he’s waiting for you to catch up. When he sees the realization in them, he tilts his head.

“Any way you can think of making it up to me now?”

Your hand jerks up instinctively, gripping the front of his shirt as you pull him closer, then pressing your lips to his. 

It takes Jack approximately two seconds to realize that you’re kissing him and that he’s standing there like an idiot instead of kissing you back.

A soft gasp escapes you when his hands grip your hips, holding you in place.

Jack pulls back enough to catch his breath, a small laugh bubbling in his chest as you eagerly chase after his lips, not quite as ready to pull away as he seems to be.

A small pout forms on your lips, and he can’t help but to lean down and press a shorter peck against it, then moving to your cheek, exhaling at the side of your face, before finally moving his head so that the tip of his nose brushes against yours. 

Your heart beats fast in your ribcage, and you let go of his shirt, opting to grip his shoulders instead.

“...I think I have some more making up to do,” you breathe out shakily, then pull him down into another searing kiss.

Jack laughs into the kiss, but can't find it in him to pull away this time.

☆END NOTE: I have no idea what car he drives, or if he even drives, but I do know that whatever it is, it’s going to be big, sleek and manual (it’s possible for amputees to drive them, and especially below the knee amputees such as Jack.)

His grips your chin between his thumb and forefinger, tilting your head to the left and the right, flecks of concern marring his hazel eyes.

You smack his hand away.

“Are you blaming a female healthcare worker for violence from a male patient twice her size?” you challenge, quirking your brow in mock offense.

You know that’s not what he means, and you almost feel bad when his face falls in guilt. But you’re still fired up from the encounter and you can’t ever resist a chance to spar head-to-head with your attending — unlucky for him, this one’s been served to you on a silver platter.

“Should we call Gloria?” you press. “I can get Javadi to make a TikTok.”

He retracts his hand back to his side where it belongs — not anywhere near you, as far as you’re concerned. It’d be frozen, hovering at the side of your face.

“Good point,” he says, hands now on his hips. “Sorry. You okay?”

You blink your rapidly swelling eye, dabbing at your split lip gently with the pad of your ring finger. “Yeah. Never better.”

He shakes his head, any concern replaced again by disappointment. “You gotta call hula hoop, kid.”

“Why? I knew you were watching.”

He opens his mouth, then closes it, rolling over the tray Lena had prepared for your room. “Well I’m not always going to be.”

You doubt that — sometimes Jack felt like a fly you could never swat away, right over your shoulder when you least needed him to be. You guess tonight is an exception.

“Those procedures are in place to keep you safe. If you’re gonna run your mouth—”

“Again, with the blaming,” you accuse.

“I’m not blaming you. It’s not your fault,” he says. “But sometimes…”

He trails off, ripping open a swab, bringing it to your lip. His other hand holds your face again as he dabs at your lip.

The bleeding had stopped after a while once Lena supplied you with gauze to hold against it, rattling off assessment questions while you could still hear Jack and Crus working with security to restrain the patient in the background.

She looked at your eye and begged you to let Shen order a CT, but you’d sat there frozen, reeling until Jack had appeared where you were situated in the empty room next door, his chest heaving and hair mussed, clearing everyone else from the room and telling them to get back to work.

The swab stings a little, even with his feather-light touch, and you can’t help but rear back, even if you don’t slap his hand away this time.

“Sometimes what?”

“Hold still,” he says, hand tightening on your chin. He keeps dabbing, swearing when you feel a new line of blood start to trickle down your chin. You grab a pad of gauze off the tray and hold it up to your chin yourself, before he grabs it from you and wipes it himself. “Sometimes I just wish you’d mouth off a little less.”

You scoff, and he pulls back with frustrated resignation, like he’s ready for the monologue you’re about to burst into. He’s heard them enough times.

“Sorry I don’t just let these daddy’s money fucks walk all over me for our patient satisfaction scores,” you spit, your lip aching, head throbbing, heart pounding. Traitorous tears push at the back of your eyes. “They don’t scare me, and neither do the suits upstairs. They’re all cut from the same cloth. I came from a hospital way worse than this.”

“I’m sure,” he nods, still paused with the swab in his hand, holding the gauze pad with the other. “But you’re at my hospital now. So cool it. If not for your own sake, then for your attending’s, who has to sign off on all of these reports, yeah?”

“What happened to being the weirdest and wildest?” you say. “Hooah?”

“You can do that without having to enter concussion protocol,” he argues, dropping the gauze to the tray. “Night crawlers gotta be careful, too. Probably even more so.”

“Um, that’s wild. Was it not you I heard earlier telling someone to shut their fucking mouth?” you retort. He still holds your jaw, his grip firm but not harsh — nothing like the man who’d done this to you — continuing to dab at your lip until he’s satisfied before discarding the swab onto the tray next to the gauze.

He grins at your remark then, some tension evaporating from the room, even if he still scans your face with intensity. He looks kind of silly, trying to smile with a crease in his brow.

“Touche. I for one can’t wait to read the review he leaves,” he says. “I’m sure I’ll get a CC on that one.”

“‘Stupid bitch doctor didn’t let me obstruct an active investigation,’” you say. “‘Cut my ugly Brooks Brothers golf shirt off. Papa’s lawyer will be in touch.’”

Abbot’s still smiling and you find yourself doing it too, wincing when your lip stretches over the broken skin. “Motherfucker.”

“C’mon, res,” he sighs, reaching for another swab, ripping it open. You let him fix up your lip unbothered this time, not speaking. He doesn’t feel the need to hold your face still this time, but you almost wish he would.

When he speaks again, it’s no longer chastising.

“How about,” he starts, throwing the second swab on the cart, shucking his gloves into the trash and opening the monitor across the room with his badge. “‘Put my stupid, privileged hands on a pretty resident and got tossed into police custody. Zero stars.’”

He makes another off-handed comment not to laugh at that and fuck up your lip again before he mumbles his way through your chart. But you’re not laughing at all, your stomach actually flipping at his words.

“Patient presents agitated.”

“Wait, what are you doing?” you say, standing, nudging into his space to see he has a chart open for you. “Can’t we keep this off the books?”

He laughs, still typing, his arm moving against yours. “Not a chance in hell. Go home.”

——

You’d noticed something off about Jack as soon as he’d entered the ED during the day shift half of your double, yelling and sweaty in his SWAT gear, bringing a wave of testosterone onto the floor along with his colleagues.

But he’d struggled throughout the entire procedure, leaning on you and Robby for every step.

“Bag him,” he practically winces, shuffling out of the way, hands held up while you take over Hiro’s intubation.

With Hiro’s vitals closer to stable, Garcia nods for him to be taken upstairs into a waiting OR, and Jack barely cracks a pained smile to an insult about being an adrenaline junkie — nothing smart to say for once.

He exits the room promptly at Robby’s question about contacting Hiro’s family, saying someone else on the team can help him, passing directly behind you.

“You’re with me,” Jack says, his breath fanning against the nape of your neck. “Now.”

His eyes find yours for one brief, weighted moment as he shoulders open the Trauma 2 door with a poorly concealed wince.

If not for your worry, you’d have immediately made a snide remark.

You look to Robby, slightly shell-shocked, wondering if he’d heard. Perlah definitely had, if the eyes she’s giving Princess say anything.

Robby just shakes his head. “I don’t think he was asking.”

You sigh, ripping your gloves and gown off into the bin and stalking off in the direction he’d gone, seeing a flash of camo duck into one of the South rooms across the way, wondering what you could’ve possibly even done to tick him off in the measly 10 minutes he’d been here.

You open the door after taking a deep breath outside the room.

“You know you can’t boss me around when you’re not even on shift,” you start.

“Shut the door,” is his instant reply. Message not fucking received.

Jack’s sitting on the bed already, the curtains drawn closed around the entire room, only a small gap left for you.

The room quiets as the door clicks shut behind you, and you draw back the curtain just enough to join him bedside before closing it again.

“What’s—”

One of his elbow pads already discarded on the bed, Jack is undoing the velcro straps on the right side of his Kevlar, but there’s that wince again once he moves to his other side. He tries to reach around his torso, but he can’t get the angle right, and he looks at you.

“Please help me get this thing off.”

You still have yet to learn why he’s clearly in pain, but you can tell the sweat running down his temple isn’t just from the July heat anymore as you step into his space.

“You’re hurt,” you realize, undoing both velcro straps on his left side. You dig your hand into the slight gap between his camo quarter-zip and the vest, pulling the straps out of the plastic loops attached to the back panel of the vest.

“Not badly,” he says, stilling as you push his hand away where he’d been trying to free the straps on the other side, doing it for him.

Both sides undone, you stand back slightly, moving your hands toward his shoulders. You detach the radio he has clipped onto the vest’s collar, placing it on the bed.

“Ready?”

He nods.

The vest comes off easy, but it’s heavy — he still winces as it drags over where he must be injured.

“Sorry.”

“You’re fine,” he breathes. “Just throw it wherever.”

You set it aside on one of the chairs, taking his radio, too, and setting it on top. When you turn back around, he’s already swearing under his breath and struggling with his long sleeve, caught under the remaining elbow pad.

“Alright,” you say, slightly annoyed, but mostly worried. “Do you want my help or not?”

He manages to undo his elbow pad, but grimaces as he shakes it off his good arm. He stops struggling with the shirt after a bit, his right arm stuck halfway through his sleeve. You can’t help the smile that sneaks onto your lips.

“Wow,” he says, but he’s smiling a little, too, incredulous. “This is funny to you?”

“Only a little,” you say. You assess how his arm is awkwardly caught in his sleeve, deciding on your next move. The thing is, you know exactly what you’d do if this was a patient, and not your attending. But you suppose he’s more one than the other right now.

“Do you mind?” you ask, gesturing to the bottom of his shirt.

“No. Not at all,” he says.

“Okay,” you say. “Let me just…”

You pull his right sleeve taut, your other hand going up under his shirt — thankfully, you feel an undershirt on the backside of your hand. He snakes his arm through the rest of the sleeve, and you stretch the shirt up over his head, his sweaty curls flattening further on his head. You really ought to offer him some electrolytes, and maybe a towel.

“I can’t believe they make you guys run around in all this gear when it’s this warm out.”

“Supposed to—” he winces as you drag the rest of the shirt down the arm on his injured side “—keep us safe.”

“Results may vary,” you say under your breath, setting his long-sleeve on the bed.

“Bullet could’ve gone right through without it. I’ll take my chances.”

Your mind catches on the first word, frozen as Jack seems to barely pay it any mind. Why would he, you wonder to yourself, given his history and his reputation — a troubling affliction for adrenaline.

“You got shot?”

“Shot at,” he says, shrugging. Another grimace. “Fuck. It should be a superficial wound, but it’s on my back, and I knew I wouldn’t be able to treat it.”

Your gaze assesses the last layer between you and his skin, his black undershirt, fitted across his chest and arms. No way you’re getting that off of him without it hurting like hell if he can barely undo his elbow pads.

He narrows his eyes. “What are you—”

“It’s the only way.”

“This is my nice shirt,” he warns slowly, eyes tracking you across the room to one of the drawers he knows as well as you do stocks the fabric shears.

“You’re sweating and bleeding all over it,” you say flippantly. “Or do you really want me to try and pull it off?”

He huffs a sigh.

“It’s a fucking t-shirt, Jack,” you say, already hacking at his sleeve. “We can get you a new one. Size small?”

“You little—“

“Extra small. Got it.”

His left arm free after you cut a line from the sleeve to the collar, his pale, freckled shoulder now exposed to the room, you finally get a chance to look at what he’d been complaining about.

“Holy shit,” you breathe, leaning over the side of the bed, getting the best look you can.

“S’not that bad, is it?” he asks, turning to look over his shoulder, grimacing once again.

“Stop moving,” you say, your hand on his face, pushing it away from you. “Have you taken any pain reliever?”

“Got kinda busy,” he says. “You rocked that shit in there, by the way. With Hiro. I’m sure you knew that though.”

Your hand falls away from his jaw. “Doesn’t hurt to hear.”

You come around to cut the rest of the material away, suddenly painfully aware you hadn’t gloved up again in the rush of it all. You pull the fabric from his body as far as you can, but your knuckles still brush against his stomach, his chest, his sternum as you make your way up. The butchered material falls away as you push it off of his body, guiding it down his good arm. You turn away pointedly as soon as he’s properly shirtless, bunching up the ball of fabric and placing it with his vest just to have something to do.

“Just trash it,” he says softly. “I might have you get another from my locker, though.”

“All that fuss,” you say, finally putting a pair of gloves on. “And you had a spare.”

He’s smirking when you do turn back around, and you roll your eyes.

“Let me see, will you?”

It’s quiet after that as you assess the wound. He’s right that it’s superficial, but it still could probably use a few stitches.

You tell him as much, and he nods.

“Whatever you suggest, doc.”

You pull your mouth to one side, still assessing, your hands light. “Maybe we get Robby or someone else in here, just to check. Or I can grab you a mirror?”

You see him shake his head. “I didn’t ask Robby to come in here. I asked you. I’m your patient. Make the call.”

You stop crouching over him just as he turns around again, his gaze fixated on you, his eyebrows raised in anticipation.

“I’ll grab a suture kit.”

He nods. “Good. A shirt too, yeah?”

You snap your gloves off and throw them in the trash, flipping him off when they miss and you have to pick them up off the floor.

“I’ll have Dana get it when I put in the order for the anesthetic,” you say, logging into the monitor by the sink after sanitizing your hands. “I think some imaging, too. You’re in a lot of pain.”

“Don’t involve anyone else. I’ll sign off on the order,” he says, then pauses, and you can see him squinting at you in your peripheral. “What are you doing?”

“Starting a chart for you,” you murmur mindlessly, entering his details into the demography section. “Patient presents agitated.”

“Off the books,” he says firmly.

You scoff, tapping the rest of the current line of your assessment out before saving it, locking the display, like he’s in any shape to lunge over and delete it. “Not a chance in hell. Be glad I saved you a little speech about being careful. They’re quite dull.”

“No hula hoop on a SWAT raid,” he says, crossing his arms over his chest, wincing when he remembers he can’t do that right now.

It’s too late though — the image of your attending shirtless, wearing camo pants and sweating all over the exam bed, arms taught over his chest, will be burned into your retinas for the foreseeable future.

“Maybe there should be,” you mumble, crossing the room to him again. You look at his wound one more time, mentally noting you’ll need irrigation, too, and maybe a Plastics consult that you know he’ll refuse.

“Yeah?” he asks, looking up at you when you stand full height again. “You worried about me?”

You shrug. “If you die and leave me stuck under Robby…”

He chuckles. “‘Cause they’d never stick you with Shen, right? You’d get fuck all done together.”

You can no longer help the smile that has irritatingly been threatening to break through for a while — ever since you’d discovered he actually was okay, really.

“It wouldn’t be good for the hospital.”

“So maybe we both agree to be a little more careful then,” he suggests, wincing as he stands again, pushing himself off of the bed. “Deal?”

“Deal,” you say.

“Your eye looks good, by the way,” he says. Your eyes narrow at the way his voice has dripped into that deeper register. The same one it takes on when he tells you atta girl and you’re with me, now. “Healed nicely.”

Open bullet graze, sweaty curls and all, Jack makes his way to where you’re standing, his hand grabbing your face like he had just last week, titling your head side to side. This time, his thumb brushes softly over where your lip had split, the skin new and soft under his calloused fingertip.

“This, too,” he murmurs, pressing down just slightly.

You let him linger for just long enough, chancing a look up at him through your lashes, reveling in the way he looks down at you now — something that had annoyed you only last week when you were up on that bed instead.

But then you smack his hand away.

A mythological creature of PTMC’s Orthopaedics Department— some beastly, thalassic leviathan— who’s all jagged rows of endless teeth and killer instinct; Made out to be a divine, merciless warden of the sea responsible for piecing together centuries old bones buried five fathoms deep into bedrock.

A virtuoso of his field who you owe your knowledge to. Who’d taught you the fearlessness common of surgeons, but also instilled in you the fear of failure that’s needed to temper it.

What is it that Garcia and Walsh like to call you residents under his wing (or fin—), again? 

Shark pups. 

Left to fend for yourselves most of the time. Sink or swim. A dogfight of devouring each other alive in a desperate attempt to keep your head above water; to make it through this riptide of a Residency and be the best of the best.

Park the Shark stands on a mantlepiece of his own making. A faultless reputation sharp enough to cut, and the stringent attitude to match that’s a given considering his medical prowess and achievements. The other juniors— aw, these your shark pups, Park?— tenderfoot and wet behind the ears, worship the ground he walks on like suck-up remoras.

You admire him, yes. But most of the time you just… try to get by. Keep your head down and stay out of his way. 

(Not that you never advocated for yourself, that is. Being a woman in a particularly male-dominated specialty has only drilled into you an extra layer of thick-skin from criticism and inherent misogyny. You don’t fawn to the quote-unquote Ortho-bros, and have enough clever sense to know when to be candid without crossing the line.)

Perhaps that’s why he’d quickly clamped his jaws around you.

Always seen as the ‘favourite’; the ‘Prodigal Daughter/Mentee’, even if it never remotely feels like you’re worth any of Park’s precious time. 

Resentful, the other Residents eventually came to the conclusion that competition starts with you: 

Always the one personally selected to assist in Park’s odd cases, always the one his shark-like gaze searches for first in a crowd, always the one getting teeth sunken into and then humiliatingly chewed out for the smallest, mindless things because You’re supposed to be the competent one out of all the others, for fuck’s sake. 

They spin yarns of boyish rumors. Call you names that stick. Sharkbait, Catch, when they’re feeling particularly bitter. Or the Jewel of the Sea; Park’s prized (Mother-of-)Pearl, when they’re feeling particularly childish.

It’s fine. You can ignore those, and let your work do the talking. Besides, they never do address you that way around Dr. Park, anymore— not after he’d nearly bitten the head off of one of the R3’s after he’d overheard you openly be called Chum-dump in passing.

(“The fuck did you just say?”

“Uh… Nothing. I— It won't happen again. Sorry, Dr. Park.”

“The hell you apologising to me for and not her?”)

You tell yourself it’s just because Park doesn’t want to be associated with the likes of you; that it’s nothing to do with him being chivalrous— he’s just being professional. Doing his due duty as your Senior Attending to browbeat workplace misconduct.

(Don’t think too much of it. He doesn’t care. You’re not of value to him in any way you think.

How does the saying go? Never cast pearls before swine—)

You wonder if he’s aware of how much his implicit bias has you isolated in an already isolating field for a woman. A target on your back. How his apparent unspoken ambition for you and your capabilities alone have become somewhat of an albatross around your neck. 

You’ve done the work to get here, you remember him muttering mid-procedure once. I might make a surgeon out of you yet.

Park is utilitarian; he doesn’t waste time on petty endeavours— he couldn’t possibly be doing it on purpose, could he? To keep you orbiting close to him whether you like it or not, lonely from the ostracism you receive from your fellow peers, all for the sake of imparting in you what’s best. Deliberately exploiting his influence into favouritism so you rely on him and only him for company; starved for kinship.

None of which he ever gives you, either way.

Just his stoic, brooding silence. A single hum of assent or curt nod when you answer his questions flawlessly during one of his rare moods of actual teaching (“Hm. You’ll close after I’m done, pup.”); Or his lingering presence over your shoulder in the breakroom when you’re brewing a fresh pot of coffee, shoulders brushing (“I take it black.”).

Feels more like bait, really. Dangling right in front of you; waiting for you to take the bite. 

Or have you already bitten?

“ED’s paging. You don’t need me in here,” Park declares, over a traumatic pelvic crush injury slowly coming to its end. He nods to the surgeons in Vascular when they say they’ll finish up the rest of the procedure, and jerks his head at you to degown. “You. With me.”

The elevator sinks both of you all the way down to the bottom-dwellers. Emergency Medicine: a never-ending bustle of nervous energy and raucous commotion of sounds that grates at Park’s ears. When he sails into Trauma Bay 2 with you tailed close behind, medical staff part for him like the Red Sea; shoal of fish dispersing from an apex predator.

Robby greets him calmly despite the patient groaning his lungs out. Garcia is already rattling off an efficient presentation. …Crush injury to foot and ank… Compartment syndro… torn between salvaging the limb t… what do you think? 

Meanwhile, a pair of impressionable Med Students observe, rapt, as you glove up and curiously round the writhing patient in the exact same way Dr. Park does— an unconscious habit you’ve picked up from him; circling calculatingly like a shark sniffing out blood in the water. (Do you hear that? quietly nudges one of the Residents, the JAWS theme?)

They watch as you shadow Park, comically insignificant against the hulking brawn of him, scrutinising the X-Ray of the patient’s shattered foot. It’s a unique case, alright: a complex multiple fracture of practically every bone in his foot up to his ankle from a freak accident. 

Even Park reacts with a tiny, impressed snort that only you manage to catch by chance proximity.

“Give me something for the fucking pain already!” a voice lashes out, synchronising you and Park into sparing a narrow glance up from the bedside of the patient’s gurney.

“Mr. Aldrich, we’ve already given you more pain meds after the regional block,” soothes one of the ER nurses, “the ketamine will take a minute to kick in—”

“Screw you nurses!” he hisses, thrashing his head pointedly at you as he squirms in place. “Get me a real doctor!”

“You’ve got multiple in one room here to help you, Sir,” Garcia overrides, humorously, “take your pick.”

An exasperated growl. “Fucking, I don’t know, a bone doctor?!”

“Good news! You’ve got Orthopaedics to your left,” she gestures, shooting you an amused look.

Mr. Aldrich glares harshly at you. “Well? Move, bitch, and let me talk to the big guy behind you.”

Across the bay, Robby doesn’t get to snap at the verbal harassment in time. No, it’s—

—Dr. Park, pinning his tenebrous gaze at the patient as he cocks his head ominously.

“You’re gonna wanna speak respectfully to the ‘bone doctors’ responsible for getting you back on your feet, Sir,” he drawls, sangfroid as always before returning his attention completely to Robby.

(You don’t try to pick apart the notable undercurrent of… something in his tone. Chalk it off as non-negotiable decorum. If it isn’t Dr. Park who’d have said something, you’re sure someone else would have.)

Hell of a fracture, you ignore the patient, running a mental map of the potential procedures it’d take and what the prognosis would look like. Dr. Park busies himself with more details regarding the injury: mechanism, labs, drugs. Pokes and prods clinically at the patient’s numbed foot.

“We’re gonna need your consent, Sir,” comes everyone’s eventual finalised conclusion, where you keep your tone as calm as possible in a bid to deescalate the tension, “before we get you prepped for surgery.”

“You better fucking make sure I walk again,” he seethes. “My legs are my livelihood, you know that? Do you know who I am?”

“Mr. Aldrich,” you answer, patiently. “I’m taking that as a yes?”

“Oh, you think you’re fucking funny, do you—?”

An iron-grip stops the patient’s forearm short well before you even register it:

A swing at you. An attempt to snatch at you from the bedside to drag you like an undertow.

Sharks are a predatory species born with sixth sense. An innate electroreception that helps them zero in on the most sensitive of muscle movements within close-range. Top of the food chain. Evolutionarily driven by pure, lethal instinct leading them to their prey.

You wonder, idly, if Dr. Park has it too—

Bloodlust. Untamed animalism prowling somewhere behind his hunter eyes. His scrub sleeves are pulled tight from the flex of his biceps, tension of corded muscles in his forearms taut with brutal force from where he’s canceled out the threat in a whipcrack of a second: shackling the patient’s wrist effortlessly in a dizzyingly lightning-quick reflex.

Your heart stutters at the scene.

“Go on,” Park dares, voice glacially cold and sea-pelagic dark. “Take a swipe at my resident again, and I will break each and every single bone in your hand before resetting all 27 pieces of it back together.”

A beat.

You’d have been able to hear a pin drop in the trauma bay, somehow, from how suspended everything feels.

Akin to witnessing an abyssal leviathan come to breach ashore after being provoked.

It makes something treacherous take flight in your chest. 

That for as much as a supercilious asshole Park is sometimes, he still keeps a controlled, watchful eye on those in his wake as a mentor. Utilises that intimidating, ubiquitous command of presence he carries to his unfair advantage when things go leeways into dangerous waters.

It’s not heart, per se. But it’s certainly something rare. Some abstract, omnipresent patina of his that surrounds your being like a levee and safely harbours you. Shoreline rock armour, almost: Feeling like the broad, muscled stonewall that is Dr. Park has become your own living, breathing, metaphorical breakwater. 

You find yourself foolishly replaying his words like a broken record in your head.

My resident.

The patient visibly deflates, snatching his weak arm free from Park’s vice-like clutch as he rears back and loses all bravado. “I consent to the surgery,” he grits out, still turning his nose up against everybody. “After that I’ll sue all of you assholes for— for harassment. And you! For threatening me.”

Robby and Garcia bite back a laugh at the irony.

“Looking forward to it,” Park sneers, aggressively snapping his gloves off. He turns back to you and, uncharacteristically, nods at you to sidle past first and make headway towards the exit. “I’ll book an OR.”

Thanks, Shark, Robby calls out, gaze flickering curiously between you two before it lands as a side-eye to Garcia— who also seems to be trying to decipher something nameless as Park hovers close behind you.

The entire ordeal leaves a buzz under your skin.

My resident, you repeat again. His chum. His catch. His coveted pearl; his favourite pup—

The words are muffled in your memory. Underwater. The flash of canine-sharp teeth as he bit the threat out, cavalier, deceivingly calm. The unbidden warmth of safety blooming in your ribcage after he’d put himself between you and danger, and you’d essentially been tucked protectively behind the fabled Shark of PTMC’s Orthopaedics.

You should neither be allured nor girlishly thrilled at the idea of Park showing any semblance of anger at your behest— you’re in a hospital, for christ’s sake, not the cold open of a romance novel— But who doesn’t like to be defended at times? Let alone by the most notoriously unsympathetic surgeon you’ve ever come to know yet? 

“Thank you,” you muster the courage, once both of you are taking the silent ride back up to the Ortho-wards, “for earlier.”

He scoffs. It’s delivered, surprisingly, with less bite than you steeled yourself for.

“How about you keep your head on a swivel,” he advises pointedly, glaring down at you with disapproval. “Should’ve just let him grab you. Might’ve learned a lesson or two.”

But you’ve worked alongside him long enough to catch the minutest of tidal shifts in his callous voice— an antsiness; the faux-calm of doldrums out at sea. Something hadal in you knows that had the patient actually managed to snatch you in that riptide grip of his, Park would have ensured the man left the hospital with no functioning hands at all.

Or perhaps it’s just a delusion. Feverish calenture. A self-indulgent desire to have secretly collared the terrifying Park the Shark to be your own proverbial seadog: 

Bristling and snapping his serrated teeth at anyone that got too close; orbiting you like a predator possessively guarding their own claimed territory. Exclusively yours. 

(“Only I get to call you pup,” he’d said, once upon a time. Out of context, it makes your head reel every time you recall it.)

“Yeah. Sorry,” you say, pathetically. A force of habit; defaulting into deference.

Only—

“Are you?” he narrows, shrewdly.

It feels like something’s buried itself right into its target. Harpoon to a siren’s heart. 

“I—I…” you blink. Stumble your words. No, comes the candid instinct. You think of how he’d stepped in, how he’d handled the danger; All for you. I liked it.

“Don’t get used to me playing nice,” he continues at last, looking damningly straight into your soul.

It lights your body aflame. Feel a rush to your cheeks at the unintended (perhaps?) implication of his words. “That’s your nice, Dr. Park?”

The elevator dings through the charged air. He turns back forward lazily.

“For you,” he grunts dismissively. “Yeah.”

You blink. The doors slide open. 

The servants should have known better than to bring out the black.

The yard behind the stables was still blue with morning when the stallion tore the tether free. One moment, he was standing, gleaming and restive beneath the groom’s hand; the next, his head snapped up, ears cutting the air, nostrils flaring at something only he could scent in the cold. The white steam of his breath gusted once. Twice.

Then he exploded.

The steed shot upwards, its front hooves flailing against the pale sky, and the groom cried out, stumbling backward as the leather strap seared through his grip. He came down awkwardly, the stallion, in a half-turned, half-twisted motion, his rear end bunching as if to propel him forward. The tether, looped through a hoop in the post, tugged sharply, resisted for a moment, and then snapped free, its iron ring echoing loudly against the wood.

“Easy, Drogon,” Baelor said, his voice cutting through the air, his feet already sending him onward with an automatic urgency. The steed’s eyes rolled white, catching the pale autumn light. He danced sideways, shoulder striking an empty cask hard enough to overturn it, muddy water sloshing over the packed earth.

A kitchen boy, hurrying across the yard with a basket full of wood, stopped dead in the animal’s way.

“Move!” Baelor barked.

He didn’t. The stallion reared up, the loose leather whipping behind it with a sharp crack, and then bolted forward with an angry snort. With a gust of wind, the boy’s basket was knocked from his hands, and sticks and bark tumbled across the cobblestones a heartbeat later. By the time Baelor reached the fence, the horse was already in full flight, black flank slick with cold sweat, tail streaming.

“Close the south gate!” someone shouted.

“Too late, he’s past—”

Hooves hammered over stone, then muffled as they hit the softer earth beyond. In a breath, the stallion was gone: a streak of black cutting through the mist, vanishing toward the tree line. Silence fell in his wake, thick and embarrassed. The air stank of churned mud and animal fear. A couple of chickens, disturbed from their pecking, took flight briefly before landing again with disgruntled squawks. The kitchen boy stood in the middle of it, chest heaving, splinters of kindling at his feet.

Baelor’s eyes blazed as he spun to confront the stablehand, his knuckles whitening on the sword hilt, a silent promise of pain in the air.

“What were you thinking?” he snapped. “You know he spooks at sudden noise, and you bring him out when they’re beating barrels? Gods, Gerren, I told you—”

The man blanched, broad face folding in on itself. “My prince, I—I checked the yard was clear—”

“It plainly was not.” The words came out too sharp, each one like a thrown bit of gravel. “That horse is worth more than—”

He stopped himself there, jaw locking. The kitchen boy had flinched at his first shout. Now he stood stiff, gaze fixed on the ground, fists curled in the air above his empty basket. A flush crept up his neck and onto his face, a warm, spreading tide that made his skin tight and his eyes sting.

The anger pulsed within Baelor, ricocheting off his ribs and shattering against his inner resolve. He drew a slow breath, long enough that it smoked visibly in the chill. He released it through his nose, pressing two fingers briefly to the bridge of it. His pulse thudded once, twice, then steadied.

“My temper was for the horse,” he said, this time quieter. “Not for you.”

Gerren shifted, uncertain. The kitchen boy risked a glance up and then away again.

Baelor softened his tone deliberately, the way a rider relaxes his hands on the reins. “No harm was meant. I know that.” He looked back toward the open gate, where the mist was lifting over the fields beyond; the low rise of the woods already a solid, dark line. “But a lot has been put into him.”

Baelor didn’t say years. He didn’t mention that the powerful stallion, a creature of untamed energy, was the only consistent presence in his life, bridging the gap between the thunderous tourney fields and the suffocating, oppressive halls of court. That when everything else required a posture, a word, a calculated smile, the horse had required only consistency. A steady hand. Honesty.

“He’s my favourite,” Baelor said instead, the admission feeling bare in his mouth. “We must retrieve him.”

“We’ll send men at once, my prince,” Gerren offered, half eager, half anxious. “Four riders, maybe five. The wood’s edge is—”

Baelor’s mouth tightened. The edges of the local woods were a hungry place, a place that consumed anything unable to navigate its paths.

“I’ll lead the search,” Baelor said.

Gerren stared at him. “Your Grace, with respect—”

“I am not yet king,” Baelor cut him gently. “And I am not sending anyone chasing him who cannot read when he’s about to bolt again.” He looked back towards the forest, observing the Riverlands mist gathering in the hollows, its white tendrils weaving through the trees and its grey form clinging to the branches.

“Saddle another mount. Light and quick. We’ll stay to the edges.”

“As you say, my prince.”

Baelor reached down, picked a fallen sliver of kindling from beside the boy’s boot, and set it back into the basket himself before straightening.

“The fault was mine,” he addressed the boy, meeting his eyes just long enough to make the words stick. “I startled him as much as any of you.”

The boy’s throat bobbed as he swallowed hard. “Yes, my prince.”

Baelor’s shoulders slumped as he turned toward the gate, the biting wind chilling him to the bone and a hollow ache settling in his chest. His jaw set with determination. Behind his composed profile, the thought gnawed: a black stallion, loose in Whispering Wood, his training undone in a heartbeat.

It was a familiar feeling.

The forest woke differently from the castle.

It did not clang or chatter. It exhaled.

Mist hung in the lower branches like breath held between teeth, a pale film clinging to the undergrowth and sinking into hollows where last year’s leaves lay in damp, matted layers. Above, the canopy filtered the weak, late-autumn light into thin, greenish ribbons that slanted down across trunks, interrupted by patches of moss, old wounds, and the deep, vertical lines etched by time.

You moved through it with familiar ease, like entering a room where the quiet hum of conversation had only paused for your return. Your boots sank half an inch into the leaf mould with each step, making a soft, sucking sound. The cold seeped up through the soles, a clean, metallic chill that bit pleasantly at your toes. Your trousers, damp to the knee from the dew-wet ferns you had pushed through earlier, clung to your calves and thighs.

Your attire suited the surroundings, not the observers: a dark riding surcoat, belted snugly over a linen shirt, wool trousers tucked into scuffed boots, and a cloak the color of wet bark draped open and loose from your shoulders. The only bright thing on you was the small weirwood-and-raven brooch at your throat, the Blackwood sigil dulled by age and touch.

Even though the morning had barely begun, stains already marked your gloves. The smaller basket on your arm cradled the spoils: pale, fleshy discs of oyster mushrooms arranged as if they were scales of some soft, subterranean fish; a cluster of chanterelles, their undersides finely ridged; a single, perfect hen of the woods, dense and layered like a ruffled fan, pried carefully from the base of an old oak. Mushrooms told on the forest as well as tracks.

You knelt beside a rotting log; the wood long gone to sponge under your palm. A scatter of tiny, translucent caps trembled there, almost invisible until you leaned close. You did not touch them. They emitted a faint shimmer, an oily sheen that caught the fog-filtered light, creating an unsettling, in a way, wrong feeling.

“Not you,” you murmured, more to yourself than to them. “You’d have my liver for breakfast.”

You straightened, knees damp, and let your eyes travel. Everywhere you looked, something had left its mark. The story of the place was etched into its marks, twists, and empty spaces. A sapling, twisted unnaturally and snapped at the top, bore witness to passing deer during last rut’s mating season, their antlers snagging and tearing. A darker, smoother patch on the bark of a beech, greasy with the rub of a bear’s flank months ago, now drying to a dull, scabbed sheen. Higher up, four long, parallel scars sank deep into the trunk, the width of them and the smoothness of their edges saying claws rather than blades. On another oak, the grey bark had been stripped in a lengthy, clean swath for nesting fibres;

Beneath your feet, the earth was freshly disturbed, marked by the distinct tracks of hooves, larger ones, forming a trail that led toward the babbling stream, showing a small herd of deer had recently passed. You read the depth, the spread, the slight drag of a back hoof and stored it away without effort. The Whispering Wood was a book you had been reading since childhood. Every morning you stepped into it was another page, another short paragraph added to a lifelong story. The chapter today was veiled in mist, its edges sharp with a slice of cold, and carried the earthy scent of soaked foliage, ancient bark, and a subtle, metallic undertone. Early autumn. The leaves had only just begun to turn, tips tinged yellow, a few bronzed scouts already fallen and dotted with mould. The air was thick enough that each breath felt like drinking; it lay on the back of your tongue, damp and green.

You had spotted a promising ring of mushrooms at the base of a hornbeam, their caps brown and rounded, not too glossy, the gills neat, when the forest offered you something else.

The first thing that caught your eye was a flicker of motion, an anomaly. Not the quick, countless flickers of birds, or the furtive scurrying of small things in the undergrowth. This was heavier, a deeper disturbance. A shadow slid between two oaks at the edge of your vision, then vanished behind the white veil of low-lying fog. You turned, one hand easing the birch bark basket closer against your hip, the other dropping instinctively to the knife at your belt—not because you meant to use it, but because your body liked the reassurance of steel. For a moment, there was nothing. Just mist and trees and the quiet drip of condensed fog falling from a high branch.

Then he stepped out.

For a heartbeat, you truly wondered if you had misjudged the strange little cluster by the log. That some treacherous cap had slipped into your basket and was now blooming hallucinogenic visions within your bloodstream.

The stallion materialised out of the grey as a piece of night undone. He was big: taller than most northern stock by a hand and more—but what struck you first was not his size or noble frame. It was the way he held himself, even in panic. He was all clean lines and hard curves: long neck arched, the crest thick with a mane as black and glossy as the rest of him; shoulders falling into a deep, powerful chest; back short and strong, croup sloping into a tail that hung like a sheet of obsidian silk. His coat was a deep black that seemed to absorb all light and trap it underneath, but even through the grime of dried sweat and mud, a subtle sheen remained, glistening in dark, inky patches on his sides.

He looked like something bred in a place that believed in perfection as a sacred duty.

The saddle on his back confirmed it. You knew leather; you knew what coin could buy. This was not some lordling’s best. This was royal. Dark, supple leather, too fine to squeak, too well-used to shine, moulded precisely to a single rider’s seat. Silver mounts and buckles chased with dragons and flames, tarnished now with dirt, glinting dully where branches and old bark had scored them. One strap had a fresh, ugly scrape, the leather abraded white where it had kissed something rough at speed. The flap of the saddlebag bore a small, distinctive stamp: a three-headed dragon in relief.

Your lungs burned, reminding you that you had unknowingly held your breath.

“Brackens be damned,” you muttered, almost amused despite yourself. “Either I picked the wrong mushroom, or some Targaryen princeling has misplaced a very expensive piece of horseflesh gifted on his name-day.”

The stallion saw you at the same moment.

He checked, hooves skidding a fraction in the leaf mulch, head snapping back. His ears went flat. The whites of his eyes showed, a rim of stark, startled moon around the dark. His body thrummed with a tense, coiled dread, a feeling that felt like it was burning through him, more suited for a creature built for flight than for combat. Something had chased him. His flank muscles quivered, and faint, straight scratches marred the skin above his hock, too shallow for serious wounds but too defined for brambles, betraying its presence. Claws? Branches? A boar’s tusk? He smelled of sweat and fear and the cold, metallic tang of water—a stream, probably, crossed in panic.

You did not move toward him at once. Instead, you lowered your eyes a fraction, softening your shoulders, letting your body fall into the loose, non-threatening posture you used on half-wild colts and offended hunting dogs. You shifted your weight deliberately, the crunch of your boots on the fallen leaves a slight, familiar sound he noticed.

“Easy,” you whispered, as if he were an old friend you’d surprised in a compromising position. Your voice sounded small in the vastness between the trunks, but it was steady. “I’m as out of place as you are, I promise.”

He snorted, a sharp, uncertain noise, and danced sideways, the reins trailing, catching briefly on a low fern and then slipping free. The bit clinked softly against his teeth. His front hooves lifted an inch, came down again. He wanted to rear, but he’d run out of outrage somewhere between the castle and here. What was left was nervous energy and the edge of exhaustion.

You slipped the basket from your arm and set it down carefully on a patch of moss, making a point of letting him observe the movement. Then, keeping your hands where his eye could track them, you reached into the leather pouch at your belt.

“You came a long way to the wrong wood, handsome,” you said, fingers closing around the cool, familiar shape of the apple you’d tucked there out of habit before leaving. “Let’s see if southern princelings feed you the same as northern ladies do.”

You brought the fruit out slowly. Red over green, a little bruised on one side. The horse’s ears twitched toward the front, then back again, indecisive. His nostrils flared, catching the scent. You took a step forward. Then another. Not directly at him, that would be a predator’s approach, but on a slight angle, letting your path arc closer rather than cutting straight. His glinting black pearls tracked you, head tilting with minute precision.

“Smells better than fear, doesn’t it?” you breathed. “Come on.”

At three paces, he stiffened. You stopped. The mist between you thinned, then thickened again as a stray draught moved through the undergrowth, bringing with it the faint sound of a crow’s distant complaint. You extended your hand. The apple sat on your palm, your fingers flat so your knuckles wouldn’t feel like teeth. For a long, taut moment, nothing happened.

Then he stepped in.

It was small, a half-step, as though he were ready to bolt the instant he smelled something wrong, but it was toward you. His muzzle dipped, the delicate, whiskered skin of his upper lip quivering as he investigated. The warm puff of his breath washed over your fingers. He brushed the apple, a slight jolt running up your arm, and then held it, his teeth brushing your palm with a sting that was sharp but safe. You let him have it, resisting the urge to flinch. A flinch at this moment would tell him you were just as unsure as he was.

“There,” you said in a soothing tone, as he crunched. The apple’s crisp echoed, ripples of sound spreading in the muffled morning, crunch after crunch. A piece of apple fell, bounced in the leaves; he nosed it up, less polite now that the first barrier had broken. “See? Not all strangers mean to drive you into trees.”

While he chewed, you extended your hand with deliberate accuracy, letting your fingers caress the moist, velvety texture of his neck. He tensed, eyes flashing white again, then seemed to decide that the sweetness in his mouth outweighed the new intrusion. His skin twitched once under your fingers, but did not pull away. Up near at hand, you could see the faint ripple of his heartbeat in the hollow of his throat. It matched, almost absurdly, the thud in your own chest. You ran your palm along the muscle, feeling the way it bunched and eased under your touch. He smelled of leather and sweat and something faintly smoky: familiar stable straw, perhaps, or the lingering ghost of the yard. Presence of the royals at Raventree Hall was foreseen, a strategic move in their Riverlands campaign, though their swift arrival caught you off guard. Your thumb snagged on the rough, slightly raised edge of a recent scratch near his side. You hissed softly through your teeth, sympathetic.

“Whoever frightened you is getting their ears boxed,” you told him. “If they have any sense left after your master is done with them.”

Master. Rider. Dragon.

Your gaze slid to the saddle again, to the small, scuffed sigil on the leather. Three heads, one body. Red on black, even under the mud. Of all the horses in all the woods in all the kingdoms, a royal Targaryen stallion had walked out of the morning mist into your reach, dripping black dread and pride in equal measure. You laid your forehead briefly against his neck, feeling the warmth there through the biting air, the way you sometimes did with the big wolfhounds at home when they came in from a hunt, trembling with leftover adrenaline.

“All right,” you said, more to him than to the gods who’d arranged this ridiculous gift. “Let’s find the princeling who was foolish enough to lose you.”

A soft chuckle escaped your nostrils. “Clearly, they were far more adept on dragons than on horseback.”

You gathered the reins, feeling the weight of the fine leather in your hand, and swung into the saddle in one smooth, practiced movement, the way you had mounted onto a hundred lesser horses since you were little. The stallion danced under you for two steps, testing, then settled when your seat settled, when your thighs and calves closed around him with the firm, unafraid contact he understood. From up here, the forest looked different. The mist was a little thinner. The trunks seemed less like pillars and more like markers on a road you hadn’t known you were riding until now. You clicked your tongue once, low and encouraging.

“Show me the way, then. You know where you came from. I’ll see you back.”

He exhaled, a sound akin to a sigh, and then faced the distant scents of smoke, man, and stone. With a gentle lightness in your hand, the reins guided him as he stepped down, his sure footing a promise as he bore you from the forest towards the life intended for him. You, astride a dragon’s black stallion, a steed reserved only for the royal family, vanished into the fog with him.

A woman in hunting clothes with a basket full of mushrooms and no skirts to trip her, riding a creature that was destined to bear no one but a prince.

By the time the shout erupted, Baelor had worn a path into the yard.

The search yielded results slowly and in fragments: first came two riders, their clothes caked in mud and their faces grim, already offering apologies before dismounting. An hour later, another pair arrived, their broken branches and scraped shins bearing silent witness to their failed attempt. The mist, thick and clinging, spread low over the fields as the sun rose, pooling along the fence line like spilled milk and resisting the morning’s warmth. At this point, the edge of it sat twenty yards beyond the open stable gate, a soft, grey wall. The forest further on might as well have been a separate realm.

Baelor stood facing it, cloak drawn close against the damp, jaw set hard enough that a muscle jumped now and then at the hinge. The sound of other horses’ hooves, a dull clop on the packed earth, followed him as the search party dismounted, their tack jingling with that defeated, hollow noise animals make when their riders are lost.

“He will not have gone far, my prince,” Gerren tried, from somewhere at his shoulder.

Baelor did not answer at once. His eyes were on the mist. In his mind, the steed’s dark form ghosted through the trees, a silent, aching reminder of a joy now lost. Every snapped branch, every unseen dip in the ground replayed as a break, a fall, a shattered leg. Having witnessed the plight of many broken horses, he found it difficult to design any other outcome. Baelor swallowed, the taste of sour worry heavy on his tongue.

“Send for hounds this afternoon if he’s not back by—”

“Your Grace!”

The call cracked across the yard like a whip.

A younger groom’s voice, a nervous, wavering sound teetering between fear and excitement, reached you. Baelor’s head snapped toward him, irritation flaring; then he saw where the boy was pointing.

The mist.

Initially, the fog alone was present, swirling as a gentle breeze meandered through the trees. The shape coalesced within its darkness—a towering figure, moving with a slow, rhythmic rise and fall, far removed from the panicked, headlong flight of a galloping horse.

A black stallion emerged from the cool grey.

He came at a trot, neck arched, ears pricked. Mud speckled his legs to the knee and flecked his underside; the fine leather of the saddle stained and scored along one side, but his movement was clean: no hitch, no favouring of a leg. Each hoof landed strong and sure.

A faint, ragged sigh escaped Baelor’s lips, a sound he made no effort to hide.

Then he saw you.

For a heartbeat, his mind rejected the image: a trick of mist, some strange mirage conjured by exhaustion and worry. No one rode that horse. No one had ever ridden that horse but me. He had broken the stallion himself under the eye of the master of horse, with more bruises and more pride at stake than he would ever admit.

But you were there—on top of him.

You sat astride as if you had been born that way: hips moulded to the saddle, thighs close around the horse’s barrel, weight balanced in the easy, unconscious manner of someone who does not need to think about the body beneath, because you had always known how to listen to its natural rhythm. Each step of the steed's trot carried you forward and back in a smooth, unbroken motion, your pelvis rocking with the creature’s tempo, not fighting it.

Your cloak—dark, heavy wool—hung open and soaked, hem darkened to near-black where it had dragged through wet undergrowth, clinging in damp folds around your thighs. Your trousers were worse: plastered to your legs up to the knee, the fabric moulded to the shape of muscle and bone, showing the clean line of your calves, the flex of your knees as you absorbed the movement—details he’d memorized a hundred times on horses, never on a woman.

A smear of dirt streaked one of your cheeks, where you must have brushed at it with the back of a hand. Your hair had come loose from whatever braid it had started the morning in. Sodden strands of it, cool against your skin, clung to your temples and neck. You shed all ladylike pretense, appearing as if the very essence of the forest had mounted the horse.

The stallion’s ears flickered, yet he remained unfazed by the sounds and quick motions. As you moved from the soft earth to the firm, hollow sound of hooves on packed yard, he lessened his pace of his own volition, his trot softening to a walk beneath your hand with no visible or audible signal.

Baelor sensed a shift in the stable’s atmosphere, a hushed, collective breath as everyone present: grooms, stableboys, and riders alike—turned their heads to witness the object of the prince’s captivated gaze.

“Who,” Baelor said, and his own voice surprised him. It came out low, rougher than he had intended. He cleared his throat and tried again. “Who is on top of my stallion?”

“Lady Blackwood, Your Grace,” Gerren answered at once, half awe, half disbelief.

More than any title could, the name embodied what he was seeing.

You drew the horse to a halt a few yards from Baelor with a light hand on the reins, the creature’s warm breath puffing in short, contented clouds, not the harsh, stuttering pant of panic. As you turned in the saddle, your eyes found his.

In that instant, the yard dissolved into a narrow, airy passage directly between you.

A dark, assured look settled in your eyes; then a swift, scrutinizing gaze swept across Baelor’s face, followed by a steady, unwavering stare that caused a knot to form beneath his ribs. You took him in the way you take in a horse: not the colour of the coat, but the posture, how the weight was carried, the tension in the jaw.

He discovered, with a flicker of anxiety, that he did not know what you saw.

Then you broke the gaze yourself with an economical movement, swinging your right leg over the steed’s back and dropping lightly to the ground. Your boots met the flat surface with a gentle thud, your knees instinctively softening the landing. For a heartbeat, your hips were level with the horse’s—a straight line of woman and animal—and then you stepped away, the long, wet fall of your cloak separating you.

Your hands stayed.

You turned back to the horse immediately, fingers going up to his jaw, along the line where cheek met neck. His ears flicked back, then forward again, mildly curious but unafraid. Baelor couldn’t quite make out your hushed words, a sound more than meaning, as the horse lowered its head, the hard ridge of its nose nestling into your palm as if it recognized the touch.

“Such a good boy,” you breathed, half coo, half praise, soft enough that it felt indecent to overhear. Your lips softened around the words, going round and full, your mouth almost a pout as you pressed a quick kiss to the damp, velvety patch between his nostrils. “Easy, easy. This one is feisty,” you added, fingers scratching lightly at the base of his mane. “But absolutely, rightfully so.”

The creature closed his eyes briefly, the long lashes fluttering once against your skin. He had never done that for anyone, barely even tolerated the master of horse. He allowed Baelor and no other.

Baelor realised his hand had clenched, unthinking, around the edge of the stable doorway. Wood bit into his palm at the exact moment his mind chose to remember how firmly your legs must have gripped the saddle—and refused to grant him any kinder image.

“Lady Blackwood,” he said, forcing his fingers to relax. The name tasted unfamiliar, though he knew the house: rivers, ravens, the poisoned tree, old kings in the ancient castle that had bent the knee late and grudgingly, but aided Aegon the Conqueror, regardless. “I assume this is my horse. Drogon.”

You turned your head back toward him, one hand still on the Drogon’s neck, the other resting flat against his cheek as if to reassure the animal you wouldn’t stray too far.

“Yes, I would assume so, my prince,” your voice, a deep rumble with that unmistakable Riverlands cadence, lent a deliberate, thoughtful weight to every word you uttered. “I did not think he belonged to the village dairyman.”

The yard’s edge rippled with a brief, choked-off sound of laughter. A smile tugged at Baelor’s lips, threatening treason, but he kept his face schooled.

“He was startled,” you continued with a plain tone and no smile in sight, thumbing at a smear of mud on the Drogon’s jaw as you spoke. “Far from here, in the wild parts of the woods, where the stream bends and the old beeches grow close together. The ground was torn where he’d skidded; there were fresh claw marks on some trunks.” You glanced at the long, shallow scores along his flank. “He took a few branches, maybe something with tusks, but no more. His hooves are whole. Knees and ankles intact. No heat, no swelling that I felt.”

Your fingers had run up and down the tendon as you said it, gentle, testing, fingers spreading then coming together. The intimacy of the touch—precise and skilled and yet soft—made the words land with double weight. Baelor’s gaze stayed on your palm for a bit too long, a moment of distraction his mind couldn’t justify, his lips pressing together as he swallowed.

“The saddle is scratched,” you added as if you were responsible while brushing the thumb over a raw strip where the leather had turned pale. “But that matters less than the precious thing beneath it.”

“The scratches are of no consequence,” Baelor said, a feeling so true it would have seemed alien to him an hour earlier. His eyes were on the Drogon’s legs, tracing the familiar lines, checking every fetlock, every joint for the faintest hitch. There was none. “Leather can be replaced.”

You nodded once, satisfied with the answer.

“He is a beautiful creature,” you said. “I have never seen one quite like him.”

Pride burned through Baelor then, hot and swift and embarrassing. He felt it flare in his chest like a coal teased by a hidden draft.

“He is Prince Baelor’s pride and joy,” Gerren put in, half eager, half still a little afraid. “Bred from royal stock across the Narrow Sea, they say.”

You glanced between the man and the beast again, as if measuring the claim.

“It was a privilege to ride him,” you said, and there was a flicker of something like mischief in your eyes now, quickly smoothed over. “Even in such circumstances.” You paused, and for the first time a hint of conventional courtesy slipped into your tone, though it sat oddly, like silk over mail. “And I apologise in advance for doing so without your leave, my prince. He was too far in and too unsettled to lead on foot all the way. The path back is long. And,” you added, almost as an afterthought, “roadless.”

The emphasis on the last word was mild, but it made Baelor’s mind draw unhelpful pictures of your inner thighs tightening around the stallion’s sides, squeezing the saddle, as Drogon picked his way through roots and ruts, your hips smoothly shifting with each unpredictable dip, cloak dragging in briars, damp hem slapping against your boots with an unexpected sound.

“It is… unseen,” he said slowly, pulling his thoughts back into order, “that he lets anyone ride him. Besides me.” His eyes dropped to Drogon’s muzzle, where the animal was now lip-searching your sleeve for more apple with the greedy assurance of a beast that had decided someone belonged to him. “However, he appears tranquil in your presence.”

“Lady Blackwood is the best horsebreaker and trainer in the Riverlands, your Grace. Forgive my intrusion,” Gerren said fervently, as if the words themselves might ward off the prince’s anger. “Bless the Gods, Old and New, she found him. Should another person mount your stallion, it would undoubtedly be our gifted Lady Blackwood.”

The words hung in the air, charged with a significance that wasn’t intended by Gerren. Baelor’s ears picked up on every subtle implication and resented the way his body agreed with all of them, a pang of annoyance at its willing response.

Horsebreaker. Best in the Riverlands. Calming something too wild for anyone else. Feisty, but rightfully so. Riding without permission because the path was long and roadless.

Baelor’s mouth went dry. He sensed the intensity of numerous eyes darting between his face, your expression, and Drogon; every man in the yard heard the same echo, a sound that resonated within them, yet they all strained to maintain stoic expressions.

You seemed, for a heartbeat, to hear it too. Your brow lifted a fraction. Instead of looking away, you met Baelor’s eyes full on, one corner of your mouth curling in the barest suggestion of a smile that was not quite polite.

“If it consoles you, my prince,” you said, fingers still stroking the stallion’s neck, “he did make me work for it.”

It should not have felt like a confession. It did.

Baelor’s throat worked. The word ‘privilege’ lodged somewhere unhelpful. For one, sudden, unprincely instant he wondered whether the horse had been the only one. He caught himself, smoothed his face, and inclined his head.

“Then I am doubly in your debt, Lady Blackwood,” he said. “For bringing my friend back to me. And for managing what no one else has.”

The political matter had taken three days. Again.

Baelor had sat through two dinners, one arbitration over river rights that had been festering since his grandfather’s reign, and a very long afternoon listening to Lord Blackwood and Lord Bracken explain, with the thin courtesy of men who had been killing each other’s great grandfathers since before the Conquest, why the other one was wrong. He mediated with the patience and precision of a seasoned prince, understanding his regal presence subtly influenced conversations, a tool as potent as any blade.

Baelor had done all of this. He had done it well. He always did it well.

On the second morning, as mist settled low over the Blackwood courtyard, he stood at the guest quarters’ window, gazing at the wooden chest secured to his accompanying carriage. The political matter wasn’t the sole purpose of his journey, this time.

He had been working toward this conclusion for some weeks.

It was logistics; he told himself. The Riverlands were on his route. The horse needed a destination. A gift delayed too long becomes an insult. There were a dozen reasonable, unimpeachable reasons to stop at Raventree Hall on the way back from a perfectly legitimate diplomatic errand, none of which had anything to do with a wet cloak or the way a stranger’s mouth had softened around such a good boy and made the words sound as if they belonged in a darker room. Baelor told himself all of this. His body, stubbornly, believed none of it.

The rumble of the horse carriage echoed across the main yard in the late morning, a sound that marked the end of their meetings and Lord Blackwood’s generous offer of the hall. Baelor had thanked him with the warmth of genuine liking—the old lord was blunt, loyal, and pleasantly uninterested in flattery—and asked, with a casualness he had rehearsed once, whether Lady Blackwood might be sent for.

“She’ll be with the kennels,” Lord Blackwood replied, without surprise and without apology, a man who had made peace with this reality. “Someone will fetch her.”

Baelor nodded, expressed his gratitude, and went to wait in the yard.

He’d had the horse prepared before he left the road. The two grooms who’d travelled with the animal had done their work well: the carriage door gleamed, the tapestries folded and pinned neatly along its sides. The chest sat on the second cart, iron-bound, lid closed, strapped securely. Baelor stood beside his own mount with his hands loose at his sides, watching the courtyard’s routines carry on around him: a stableboy crossing with buckets, ravens wheeling above the great weirwood in the inner yard, a grey-muzzled hound ambling across the stones with the profound self-certainty of a dog that had decided it owned this particular patch of ground and all who moved across it.

Then he heard them.

A complex, interwoven chorus of barks and whimpers emerged from the kennels, as if the dogs were in a democratic debate over their next destination. Nails on stone. The scuff and slide of boots. Three dogs rounded the corner first, their ears and jowls flapping with every bouncy step. Two hounds, along with a broader, lower, and more menacing-looking dog whose blunt head and rolling shoulders suggested a purpose beyond mere good looks. Their attention was not on Baelor. They were not, precisely, in pursuit.

They were following.

You came around the corner after them.

His immediate thought was that the visit had been a miscalculation, though not one he regretted, but rather the opposite.

Your working jacket, made of heavy oiled leather, hung open over a once-white shirt now stained with the day’s beginnings, its fur trim dark and clumped, hinting it had been used as a towel at some point. Your leather trousers, tucked into boots that were muddy up to the ankle and beyond, bore a perfect paw print pressed in something dark and earthy across the left thigh: a large paw, four-toed, a testament from a decisive creature. Your hair was down, or most of it. A braid had survived somewhere at the back, but the rest had been liberated, and a loose strand curled against your cheek, apparently having been there long enough that you’d stopped noticing it. There was a smear of what looked like kennel mud along the inside of your right forearm, and something that might have been dried blood—animal, not yours, the quantity too small for worry—on the heel of your hand.

Baelor knew what ladies were meant to look like: silk pinned so tightly it creaked when they sat, gold at throat and wrists, hair coaxed and powdered into shapes that took three women and half a morning to achieve, a laugh produced on cue for the benefit of half a court that spent its days arranging itself around them. Gold that lay in the hollow of the neck like a collar, something a lord could close his hand around behind polite doors and have the body follow without a word.

You looked like none of that. You looked like someone entirely occupied with something that mattered, a woman who put collars on other creatures and expected them to mind you instead; A lady of an old lesser house who handled her own dirty work, unaware that the world expected her to clean up before being seen.

Baelor’s mind strayed to a place it shouldn’t have: what it would be to be led that way himself, contemplating the sensation of being overpowered, to feel a hand close at his throat and have his body go quiet and obedient without consulting his rank. It was an idle fancy for a man who was second in the realm and bred to hold reins, not give them up. He shut the door on it, a fraction too late.

As he wrestled with his thoughts and began to lose, Baelor conceded with a weary, specific clarity: Ah. Of course.

You noticed his horses first, their sleek coats gleaming, followed by the vibrant colours of his attire, and finally, the man himself. Something shifted in your face and beyond—a quick reorganisation, the eyes sharpening, the body adjusting posture without quite committing to formality.

Then the dogs caught up.

All three arrived around your legs simultaneously, completing the orbit they’d been executing since the kennels, looking up at you with the expectant attention of creatures awaiting permission to do whatever they were about to do. You glanced at them. A single look, no words, your hand dropping briefly—one flat, downward press of your fingers.

Every dog sat. Not in stages, not with a shuffle or a half‑hearted slump, but in the same instant, the way birds turn on a wind. Three animals of different sizes and tempers hitting the ground because your hand had said so.

Baelor looked at the dogs. Looked at you.

It was the forest and the stallion again, except the creatures at your feet had teeth and would gladly open a throat for you if asked. Something low in him answered the sight with a feeling he would not, under any circumstances, name. His fingers twitched at his sides, an unconscious, useless answer to the urge to see what you could make him do with only that hand.

You were already moving toward him, brushing your palms briefly against your thighs as you walked, and he could see the moment you registered the full state of yourself—a small, almost invisible pause behind your eyes, the kind not meant to be noticed. You did not apologise for it. You did not reach for your hair. You simply arrived at him, exactly as you were, and let that be the thing.

“My prince.” Your voice carried the familiar, deliberate rhythm he recalled, each word precisely placed as if pre-calculated. “I was not told to expect you.”

“The fault is mine,” Baelor replied. “I did not want to alter your morning.” He let his gaze move over you once, brief, and allowed something close to a smile to surface; the easy one, the one that said I find this charming, while some less disciplined part of him noted mud, leather, throat, the loosened strand of hair with a care that had nothing to do with courtesy. “It appears I failed.”

“You interrupted a hound that was halfway through a lesson.” The look you gave him was dry. “He was not pleased.”

“I apologise to the hound.”

“There’s no way he’ll take it.”

You took in the carriages with a practiced assessment, accustomed to deciphering their contents purely by observation. You scanned its contours, taking in its size, the ventilation grates, and the peculiar, slightly agitated movement of unseen mass within.

“You brought a horse.”

Not a question.

“I did.”

A subtle, almost imperceptible shift occurred within you, like a mere degree of change. A small brightening, quickly reined back in. Baelor caught it.

“The debt I mentioned,” his voice dropping a register, deliberate as a key in a lock. “I told you, Lady Blackwood, I do not forget.”

“You were not required—”

“I rarely do what I am required to do,” he said pleasantly, “and frequently do what I decide to do. You’ll find there’s a difference.”

You looked at him for a moment. He could see you measuring the exact width of that sentence, deciding whether to argue with it. Then your eyes returned to the carriage, and whatever debate had been occurring behind your expression adjourned.

Baelor nodded to the groom. The carriage door.

Opened.

The horse descended the ramp, its entrance as graceful and unannounced as a masterpiece entering a gallery, its presence immediately altering the atmosphere and making the surrounding air rearrange itself. Much as a woman had once ridden out of the trees and rearranged his.

He had chosen this one for that very reason. There were sound explanations, of course—bloodlines, suitability, the practicalities of Riverlands terrain—but beneath them lay a simpler truth: he liked watching people see what only Targaryen heirs could casually bring into a yard. The right horse, at the right moment, could do what titles sometimes could not.

He was young—four years at most, his body still holding the last suggestion of colt-length in the legs, the chest not yet fully filled, which only made the potential of him more startling. His coat was a rich, deep brown, which, in the shadows, deepened to an almost black hue, possessing a subtle, iridescent sheen like mother-of-pearl. The weak autumn sun illuminated the layered hues of his hip and withers, the colour of ancient heartwood, vibrant and full of life. His mane was a breathtaking sight: long, flowing waves with a delicate curl, possessing a hue reminiscent of pale hay softly kissed by late summer light; it absorbed the very essence of it, appearing almost white when illuminated and giving off a faint glow that made it look like molten gold. It was full and loose, and the breeze stirred it against his neck with a movement that felt unnervingly free.

His belly, which Baelor had observed stopped people in their tracks, was marked with patterns resembling shallow water flowing over white sand. Faint dappling, almost transparent, barely-there spots and stripes that shifted as the horse moved and disappeared when it stood still, the kind of thing you second-guessed yourself about, wondering whether you had seen it or invented it.

The grooms had placed a necklace that morning: a delicate white gold chain set with stones of black and red, the colours of Blackwood, which fell against his chest and caught the light with his every movement. The tapestries across his back bore ravens in flight against white trees, the fabric deep crimson and black, chosen to fall across the dark of his coat without clashing. It was, without exaggeration, the sort of animal one expected to see under a Lannister in full cloth-of-gold, or parading with a Tyrell tournament entourage, rather than stepping into a muddy Riverlands yard just because a prince had chosen to entertain the consequences of its placement.

His left eye, dark and liquid, held the ordinary miracle of a horse’s gaze. His right, though.

Baelor watched the realisation move through the fence line like a shiver.

The nearest Blackwood groom went very still. The armed men in the distance adjusted their positions, their glances not quite meeting. Someone’s mouth opened on what might have been a comment and closed again on a swallow. No one said a word. They did not have to. Every person who had stood close enough to the prince to see one brown eye and one unmistakably Targaryen violet now saw it looking back at them out of a stallion’s head.

He had chosen the horse for many reasons. Bloodlines. Temperament. Potential for distance and cold. That was the story he would have told if anyone had been foolish enough to ask. The truer reason was simpler, and lived in the small, private satisfaction of this exact moment: a blue right eye, set in a dark face, watching you.

The grooms had done their work; the necklace lay at the colt’s chest, the Blackwood colours blazing against his coat, the ravens and heart‑trees riding his back like a herald’s dream. But it was the eye that stopped you. You devoured the lines of him with the focused hunger of someone finally reading a text they’d waited years for, your attention locked from neck to shoulder to hip to hock, entirely uninterested in the gasps at the fence.

Then your gaze reached his head.

Left, dark. Right, blue.

You stilled in a new way.

Your expression was completely empty for a split second, just the raw, empty intake of facts. Then your eyes left the horse and found Baelor’s across the yard, and he watched you see it: brown, violet; brown, blue. The deliberate echo. The insult to common sense and good modesty that was putting a stallion with the prince’s gaze under the keeping of a minor Riverlands lady.

It was not subtle. It was not meant to be.

You held Baelor’s look for a fraction longer than courtesy required, as if measuring how far you were willing to let the implication travel. Your jaw did a small, traitorous thing—tightened and released—and your tongue pressed once against the inside of your cheek in a gesture that would have passed for nothing if he had not been specifically watching for it.

Then you looked back at the horse.

Your professional calm guided you as you detailed his finer qualities, but the knowledge sat between all three of you now like a hand on the reins: you would ride a stallion who carried his colours and his eye. You would put your knees to his sides, your weight behind his withers, your hands on a neck Baelor had chosen in his own image, and every time you did it some part of you would be forced to admit that this was what a prince’s vanity looked like when it stopped pretending to be anything else.

It was petty. It was possessive. It was, Baelor acknowledged to himself with a slow, private satisfaction, very nearly obscene in its intimacy.

He had no right to touch you.

He could, however, make sure that when you swung your leg over this beast and settled your hips to its stride, you would be doing it astride a piece of him, however symbolic. A lesser lady on a horse better suited to Lannister cloth‑of‑gold or Tyrell procession—except that your thighs, not theirs, would be the ones closing around the saddle. Your hand, not theirs, would lie against the warm, flexing throat beneath that mismatched gaze.

You understood that. He saw the moment your awe and your sense rebelled at it at the same time, and the moment your desire for the horse won.

You took one step closer.

The blue eye tracked you as you came, curious, unafraid. Beneath your ribs, an unseen force nudged you forward, compelled by an unacknowledged inner voice. Baelor’s fingers curled once, slow and tight, around the rail, savouring the fact that he had managed, with a choice and a coin and a bloodline, to arrange it so that whenever you mounted this creature, you would have to think, if only for the length of a single breath, of the man who shared its gaze.

The stallion reached the ground, took three steps, and stopped. His blue eye found you.

You froze in place. It wasn’t the composed quiet of the court, but the stillness of a body that no longer knew how to pretend. Your lips parted; the hands that had been moving to brush mud from your sleeve hung motionless at your sides. Whatever words you might have had for him earlier in the day had been quite cleanly removed.

The way you observed the horse was akin to how others behold perfection—a palpable yearning that transcended facial expression, manifesting instead in your body’s slight forward inclination and suspended breath. A distinct satisfaction washed through Baelor as he stood close enough to see it. This, too, was a language he knew: the moment when someone realised that what stood in front of them was more than they had ever expected to be offered. Power moved differently then, and he liked the feel of it.

You had not gawked at him in the mist. You had met a Targaryen prince and heir with steady eyes and a plain voice, as if his face and his reputation were facts to be filed rather than wonders to be admired. Now, though, you were standing absolutely struck in front of something he had chosen with you in mind, and some unprincely part of him uncoiled at the sight.

Baelor watched you look at it. He felt something move in him that was not, precisely, strategic or measured. Memory was unhelpful; it supplied the sound of your voice in the mist, low and pleased on such a good boy, and laid it over the way you were looking at this one now until his skin felt too tight. It was a ridiculous thing, perhaps, for the second man in the realm to be pleased that he could make a lady’s composure slip with nothing more than a horse and a decision—but he was, and the knowledge ran through him like heat.

“My prince.” Your voice came back to you a beat slower than usual. “This horse has never seen winter.”

Baelor folded his hands at his back. “He has not.”

“He is built for a king’s parade,” you said, and there was something almost sorrowful in it, as if you were arguing yourself out of something while the argument was still arriving. “For a lady in silk on a summer road. For a knight going somewhere that will remember him.” Your eyes tracked the blaze of white gold at his chest, the tapestried ravens. “Not for mud and frost and two hundred miles of northern track.”

“That is what I assumed you would say,” Baelor answered.

You looked at him.

“His dam is Essosi,” he said, allowing nothing into his voice but the clean interest of the information. “Bred for plains and cold both, built to move in wet ground without tiring, to go long between water. His sire is Crownlands stock—fast, responsive, lungs like bellows. The noble silhouette.” He paused. “Northern garron mares were used as a foundation as well, for hardiness, thick bone, and winter tolerance.” He met your eyes. “Hardy enough for the North, elegant and smooth enough for a lady.”

“Exotic enough to show off obscene wealth and ambition,” you added. The people in the yard were dead silent.

Baelor let a gentle chuckle escape his lips.

“The crossbreed is—untested. In the formal sense. Should my lady desire it, I am ready to tell everything about this particular stallion.”

You could practically taste the smug satisfaction in Baelor’s voice as he spoke the line. Someone cleared their throat.

“Untested,” you repeated.

“He has never been ridden,” Baelor declared, his violet eye glinting with a hint of impatience as he stared you down.

Something shifted in your expression. Not the doubt, not quite. For a fleeting moment, your eyes met his before darting away, as if the unspoken words had settled in several places and you were unwilling to acknowledge them all. Baelor kept his tone bland. His pulse was less disciplined.

“His hooves?” you asked. Your voice had gone quieter.

“Hard. Wider than pure Essosi breeding gives. Built to grip.” Baelor paused. “His health record is here, if you want it. The farrier’s notes as well. I brought them.”

You were looking at the horse again, not at him. The blue eye tracked you, curious, without fear, which was, Baelor knew, extraordinary in a young, unridden stallion in an unfamiliar yard. Most of them danced, pulled and found something to be afraid of. Its intelligent eyes studied you, as if an unfamiliar presence were being meticulously evaluated.

“He doesn’t know me,” you said, almost to yourself.

“No,” Baelor agreed. “He doesn’t know anyone.” He let a beat fall. Then, quietly, with precision: “You are the best horsebreaker in the Riverlands, Lady Blackwood,” he said at last. “It would please me to see the truth of that said about you. In action.”

A fractional pause. “If the lady allows.”

The yard fell silent again, the chirping of birds abruptly ceasing. No one repeated Gerren’s praise this time. They did not need to; every man present heard the echo, and every one of them suddenly found something else to look at.

You turned your head toward Baelor, and the look you gave him was different from before. It wasn’t the hurried judgment one might receive from the stable yard, nor the cool, evasive response of a woman keeping a prince at arm’s length. This was more direct. Your eyes travelled his face, settling with a thoughtful, unhurried intensity, like a person contemplating the difference between what is seen and what is truly felt.

Baelor met it.

You held the gaze long enough that he felt it—the specific, quiet pressure of being actually looked at, not as a prince, not as a title, but as a person who had brought a gift, that could mean several things and was waiting, carefully, to see which meaning you took.

It was not the open, hungry staring he knew from tourney stands and court halls, the wide eyes that drank in his face and saw only story: the Realm’s Delight, the tourney champion, the future king. It was narrower, steadier, almost inconveniently calm. You weren’t trying to impress him, or to be impressed by him. You were simply… taking stock. As if he were a horse you were considering: bone, balance, temper.

The first time you had seen him, you hadn’t even noticed the eyes. That had stung, absurdly; half the realm told stories about the Targaryen violet, and you had looked straight through it, filing him away without so much as a second glance. Now, though, after the stallion with the mismatched gaze, you looked at him and saw it. And there was a flicker there, a tiny, traitorous acknowledgement that you understood exactly what he had done.

Heat went through him like a struck vein. It showed up in small, betraying places: the way his fingers curled once against the back of his wrist where his hands were clasped; the way his throat worked as if the air had thickened; the slow, heavy pull of blood lower, coiling in a body that had no business reacting to a look as if your gaze were a forbidden touch. Being regarded like this, with unblinking attention, aroused him with an intimacy that no amount of courtly admiration had ever managed. Deliberate. Full. He felt a jolt, a visceral response to being seen so completely, so intensely, like a predator brought to bay, an awakening far more profound than the superficial praise. A forbidden current within.

For a fleeting moment, a wild, insane sense gripped him almost by the throat: that if you held his gaze any longer, if you decided to stay there with a patience of a horsebreaker, to linger, and discover what lived behind the purple and the brown; some crack in him would show itself without his permission, and an involuntary vulnerability would break through.

And the worst of it, the thing that made his grip on his own composure feel suddenly, precariously thin, was that a part of him wanted you to.

“You chose an unknown breed,” you said. “Deliberately.”

“I chose an excellent horse.”

“You chose one I’ve never handled.”

“I chose one no one has. There have been attempts, though, with dire consequences.”

A silence. The horse shifted its weight, the necklace chiming softly against the chest.

“This is a very expensive gift,” you said, “from a man who is not my kin and is not my lord.”

“It is a debt repaid.”

“It is far more than a debt.”

He inclined his head, neither confirming nor denying, letting the silence answer for him. Your jaw worked once, as if there was a plainer word you would have liked to use and had to swallow instead. You did not want to owe a prince; he had expected that. He had counted on it. The resistance put a keener edge on his own intent, the way a whetstone made a blade more itself.

“You understand what you’ve done, my prince,” you said, still looking at the horse rather than him. “No man in all kingdoms would willingly let a woman from a lesser house sit a creature like this. He will be stolen within a month, and I’ll face severe reprimand for my scandalous display: parading in the mud on something so outrageously bred it makes the Bracken studs look like plough nags, mere farm animals. The North and the Riverlands do not forgive that kind of spectacle.” You tilted your head, considering the blue eye. “Especially not when the faces in question already spend their days smeared in their own horseshit.”

The yard broke like a wave.

Laughter, sharp and delighted, spilled over the fence, devoid of any pretense. A stable boy slapped the rail. One of the men‑at‑arms bent double, wheezing. Even Lord Blackwood’s steward allowed himself the ghost of a smile, which in him might as well have been applause.

“Lady Blackwood,” Baelor said with a smile that appreciated the joke.

The sound of his voice cut cleanly through the noise. He let it sit a heartbeat, looking down at his own leather boots drenched in mud as he shifted his weight, hands clasped behind him—modest, almost, if not for the faint curve at the corner of his mouth. Then he raised his head.

The moment his eyes landed on you, the violet fleck in his right iris seemed to capture every particle of the wan autumn light.

“All the Seven Kingdoms will know whose gift he is,” he said, each word measured, almost lazy with assurance. “No one will dare lay a hand on a horse that carries my colours and my eye. And especially not the lady mounted on top. Not Brackens, no other Riverlords or Lords in the North, not any Lannister or Tyrell, not any man in any muddy yard who values his own skin.”

He let the next phrase fall with the pleasant finality of a gauntlet.

Possession. Ownership. Without a single touch or command.

“That is a crown’s promise.”

The chuckle that went through the men then was different, lower, edged with something like approval and relief. A prince staking a claim in plain hearing, wrapping a lady of a lesser house in the quiet, territorial arrogance of a Targaryen guarantee.

Baelor was absurdly, privately pleased by how good it felt to say it—and by the fact that, for once, the weight of the dragon on his breast did not feel like duty alone.

There it was, the calculation, running openly behind your eyes. Not whether you wanted the horse: you had decided that before you finished looking at him, and you both knew it. The question was the cost. What you would owe after, and to whom, and whether a gift accepted was something left open. You did not want to owe a prince. Baelor had expected this. He had counted on it, in fact, and then found, somewhere between the planning and the standing here, that he liked the clean, unbending honesty of it rather more than he’d expected.

You looked at the horse.

The horse looked at you with its blue eye.

“What a stallion,” you whispered, your voice carrying further than you intended.

“He has never been ridden,” Baelor said again, softly. “He is waiting for someone who knows what she is doing.”

You took a breath. Let it out slowly.

“If I accept this—”

“I will want to watch,” he interrupted, “from the first touch to the moment he gives you his back.” His tone stayed pleasant; the words did not.

Another silence. Your throat gave a small, involuntary gulp, a tiny crack in your maintained calm, and your fingers ghosted over your wrist, as if to confirm your pulse was behaving itself. The broad-headed hound’s tail resumed its slow, stubborn wag against the ground.

You turned back to the horse. You took a tentative step, then another, your hands already lowering into the relaxed posture that had calmed Drogon in the mist. The blue eye tracked your approach. The horse did not step back. His ears perked up, wide with curiosity, deciphering your motion like an animal senses truth: the depth of your awareness, the absence of threat in your posture, and the deliberate calm of someone who has all the time in the world. Your hand reached his nose. He sniffed once—long, searching—and then, to Baelor’s very private satisfaction, pressed the flat of his muzzle into your palm as if there had never been any other choice.

“Ridiculous creature,” you said, very quietly. Baelor could not have said with certainty which of them you meant.

“I’ll need a week with him before anything of note,” you said, not turning, fingers already learning the map of the bone beneath the skin. “Possibly more. The process takes months, but I can achieve initial results in days.”

Lord Blackwood hummed in approval.

“I am in no hurry,” Baelor said. It came out lower than he intended, almost velvety, as if his conversation implied something else entirely.

“To go anywhere in particular.”

Your hand paused for the space of a heartbeat on the long muscle of the horse’s neck, thumb pressing in, as if testing not his steadiness but your own, before resuming its slow, sure path. You said nothing to that. But your fingers curved around the horse’s jaw, initiating the slow, deliberate process of building trust, and you chose not to turn him away.

It was a ridiculous thing, perhaps, for the second man in the realm to be pleased that he could make a lady’s composure slip with nothing more than a horse and a decision—but he was, and the knowledge ran through him like heat. What followed was less comfortable.

Baelor wanted her to look at him that way.

Not at the Targaryen colours, not at the tournament record that preceded him into every hall in the realm, not at the face his mother’s ladies had called beautiful with a reverence that had always struck him as faintly impersonal, as if beauty were a property of the station and not the man. You had given him none of that in the mist. You had looked at him the way you looked at everything: with a steady, appraising patience that gave nothing away and required nothing from him in return. He had found it irritating. He had found it, if he was honest, intoxicating.

The horse had moved you. He had not.

The thought landed with the specific, unpleasant burden of an unforeseen issue he was now fixated on. What would it require? Not his title, not his lineage, not the effortless ease with which he could command a room. Something else. Something you had decided, by your own private measure, was worth the concession.

He did not know what that was. The not-knowing was new.

His father had granted him leave to choose. Not a diplomatic arrangement, not a match made in a council chamber over maps and alliances, but a choice: the particular, rare indulgence of a king who trusted his heir’s judgment in most things, including this. Baelor had taken the commission seriously and had conducted it with method. He had stood in the great halls of the Great Houses and watched ladies move in silk and gold with the practised eye of a young man, the first prince, who understood that a marriage was also a partnership, a prolonged negotiation, and that the body beside him for the rest of his life had better be one he could at least bear to sit across a table from without something in him going dim.

Baelor had not yet found the answer. He had not been looking for it in a muddy Riverlands yard.

You were not the answer; he told himself. A minor house. A woman who kept kennels and broke horses and met princes with dry courtesy and unimpressed eyes. Not a match his father would have circled on any list, not a name that solved anything he needed solved.

You were, he thought, looking at you now with your hand moving slow and sure along an animal that no one else had ever managed to reach—you were, perhaps, the last of something. The last question before the answer was given. The last afternoon of good riding before the road closed in and required him to be only what he was supposed to be.

Baelor was second in the realm. He would be first, in time. The stallion’s days would end when the harness went on, and he had known that since boyhood with a clarity that left no room for complaint.

He watched your fingers find the long line of the colt’s jaw and felt, with a quiet and unprincely resignation, that he would spend a very long time wondering what it would take to make you look at him that way instead.

You woke with the taste of wine still lingering on your tongue, and your head aching in slow, pulsing waves that rolled through one after another. When you opened your eyes, the sky above you blurring until the colors bled together before finally settling into something you could bear to look at.

You did not remember lying down.

You remembered laughter and music and feet moving until they hurt, too much wine and too much noise. But not this. Not waking beneath a tree with the smell of damp earth around you, not being wrapped in your own cloak with another much heavier one layered over it, and especially not the crooked bundle of cloth beneath your head, a pillow assembled with care but little skill.

You pushed yourself up carefully, slow enough that the world did not tilt too violently.

Something moved beside you.

Dunk lay close, stretched out on his side with one arm half extended toward where you had been, as if he had meant to keep watch and simply fallen asleep. He shivered in the morning cold, uncovered, while his bedroll sat a few paces away.

It was still fuzzy, but you pieced together what must have happened. You had too much to drink, and Dunk had brought you back to his camp, steady and responsible as always. The thought stirred a quiet warmth in your chest, the familiar reassurance of how carefully he watched over you.

You rubbed your temple and tried to steady yourself, and that was when you felt it. Not a sound or a movement, but the unmistakable sense of being watched.

You turned.

A boy sat near the horses with his knees pulled tight to his chest, too still, watching you with a curiosity that made your skin prickle. His hair was shaved almost bare and uneven in places, like it had been done quickly and without care.

For a moment, you dismissed him. A stray Dunk had taken in, maybe. A runaway. Someone who had wandered too close to camp.

Then he stood and took a few careful steps closer.

Recognition flickered across his face before you could stop yourself from seeing it, and when your eyes met his, clear and unmistakably blue, your breath caught painfully in your chest.

“Aegon!” You were on your feet at once, the name tearing out of you along with a rush of confused sound that barely resembled words.

The boy startled and hurried toward you, pressing a finger to his lips and glancing back at Dunk as the knight shifted in his sleep.

“Please,” he whispered. “Not here.”

Your heart hammered as you grabbed the back of his cloak and pulled him farther away, far enough that the trees might swallow your voices. Your head protested sharply, and you had to pause, breathing through the pain.

You wanted to yell at him. You wanted to grab his shoulders and shake sense into him. But even lifting your voice felt impossible.

“Explain,” you said instead.

He swallowed hard.

“I did not mean to cause trouble,” he said quickly. “I was with Daeron on the road to the tourney, as expected, but he does not pay attention. All he cares about is drinking. He shaved my head to hide me and thought it was funny.” His hand went up to to his head, as if only now remembering.

You stared at him.

“I thought if no one knew who I was, things would be easier,” he went on. “I could just be a boy. Then I met Ser Dunk. He is kind. And I always wanted to be a squire. Just not for Daeron.”

There was something hopeful in the way he said it, like he expected that to explain everything.

“I do not even know what to say,” you said, pressing your fingers to your temple. “You should not be here. This is not safe.”

He frowned, confused at first, then stubborn. “Then why are you here?” he asked. “You are not safe either. Father would be angry.”

Your chest tightened at the mention of him.

“Father is always angry,” you said quietly. “And I am tired of caring.”

Egg studied you, his face pinched in thought as he tried very hard to understand something too big for him.

“If you are fine,” he said slowly, “then I am fine too. We are both doing what we want.”

“When Dunk wakes,” he added, brightening suddenly, “we can meet properly. Like it is the first time. He does not need to know yet.”

You closed your eyes for a moment, the surrealness of the situation pressing in on you from all sides.

“Fine,” you said. “But you listen to me. This is not a game. And this talk does not end here.”

He nodded, serious again, and for a heartbeat, you saw not a boy, but the shape of something heavier waiting in him.

Once Dunk woke, the two of you did exactly what Egg suggested. He introduced himself as the man’s squire, and you claimed you were only a friend, the lie settling uneasily but holding all the same.

By the time you left camp, the sun had climbed high enough to burn away the chill, though the ache at your temples lingered stubbornly. Dry salt beef sat heavily in your stomach.

As you walked, Dunk explained that he had spent the day before meeting back up with you searching for a way into the tourney, and that no one seemed to remember his Ser at all. He sounded disappointed but not defeated, already moving on to his next idea, asking the great houses directly instead.

Despite his urgency, Dunk’s long stride shortening without thought to match yours as he talked, repeating the story of Ser Arlan and the houses they had once served. Behind you, Egg walked quietly with his hands clasped behind his back, his gaze flicking between the two of you.

He listened less to the words and more to the way you moved together. The way Dunk bristled at your side. The way you pushed closer without ever pulling away. He had once seen married people speak like this, his own parents, long ago.

He did not know what to make of it.

Dunk’s eyes scanned the crowd for older knights, men whose armor showed years of wear. His stride lengthened when he thought he knew someone, then slowed once again. He stopped and started as hope sparked and dimmed.

 “There,” he muttered, pointing. “No. Too young. Keep moving.”

You stayed quiet, letting him search while your thoughts slipped back to the boy walking between you. 

It was hard to watch. Dunk, kind and earnest, was trying to be heard by men who had already decided he was beneath them. You told Egg that if they truly knew him, they would understand that all he wanted was a single chance.

After several failed attempts, Dunk finally stopped at Leo Tyrell, who could not even be bothered to give him his full attention. But his gaze was elsewhere, his brow furrowed as if Dunk’s words were nothing more than noise beneath the day’s bustle.

You stood with Egg a few paces away from the failed discussion. Around you, squires hurried between tents calling for water, armor, and breakfast, the air thick with the smell of fresh bread and roasting meat. It was almost enough to distract you from Dunk’s frustration. Almost.

“This is a losing battle,” Egg sighed, kicking at a stray stone and watching the dust rise around his boots.

Your eyes swept the rows of tents, banners flapping lazily above them. “There has to be someone else,” you said.

“The tourney could end before then,” the boy grumbled.

Dunk approached, shoulders slumped but already preparing himself to try again. Sweat glinted at his temple in the sun.

Egg was the first to speak. “Was he a shit knight?” He twirled a small twig between his fingers, pretending it was a lance.

“He was not a shit knight,” Dunk muttered, jaw tight.

“Well, he couldn’t have been a very good one if no one remembers him.”

“I think all of these knights are too far up their own arses to listen to anyone else,” you cut in, sharper than you meant to. Both of them turned toward you.

Dunk lifted his arms in defeat. “There’s nothing I can do about it. I just can’t join the lists.” His shoulders sagged further, and his boots scuffed the gravel beneath him.

You stopped walking, forcing them to stop with you. “You are a knight of the realm. There will be someone who listens. And if not, fuck their permission.”

“Ride into the lists and call out Longthorn Tyrell,” Egg added helpfully. “Turn his arsehole into a lance-hole.” His voice was small, but it carried.

You nodded. “See? The boy gets it.”

Dunk looked at the two of you, frowning. “Enough now. You don’t seriously think I can just demand—”

“These royal lapdogs are not your betters,” you said, lifting your chin to meet his big eyes.

You continued walking and talking as common folk and nobles alike brushed past. Children ran between legs, squealing, chasing small wooden swords.

“They are my betters,” Dunk insisted, voice almost lost beneath the bustle. “You two are too brazen for your own good.”

Fanfare cut him off.

Two men dressed in Ashford orange stood on top of a high tower. The crowd shifted, then surged as the sound carried. Dunk turned to you, startled. “Who’s coming?”

The answer arrived before you could speak.

The Targaryens rode in, banners black and red, with a column of mounted men whose presence seemed to tighten the air itself.

“Perhaps, I should go back, ser, check on camp,” Egg said, tugging lightly at Dunk’s sleeve, trying to pull his attention away from the spectacle ahead. His small voice had an unusual seriousness and the flicker of worry in his eyes. “Make sure no thieves have been nosing about.”

“No,” Dunk said firmly. “I don’t want you going alone.”

“I’ll go with him,” you said, stepping closer to the boy.

Dunk blinked. “You’re sure?”

“Definitely,” you said, brushing a strand of hair from your face, “and I think you should march yourself into the castle and demand to be heard.” You puffed out your chest.

“That’s a horrible idea,” he said weakly, shaking his head, his hand brushing the hilt of his sword as if the suggestion had physically struck him.

You leveled him with a stern look, heels digging lightly into the dirt road. “What else have you got lose?”

He hesitated, then nodded once. “I’ll give it a try.” He glanced back at you before turning away, resolve settling into his stride.

“Can I have your sword to run people off with? Or a mace?” Egg called after him.

“You have a knife! That’s enough. And you two best be around camp when I come back.” Dunk’s voice. He was mainly talking to the younger of you. “Egg, you rob me, and so help me I’ll hunt you down with dogs.”

“You don’t have dogs,” the two of you called out in unison, despite the warning.

“I’ll get some!” His voice yelled out over his shoulder, the sound echoing across the open ground.

“Where..?” Egg asked, stepping forward, eyes wide.

Dunk turned back once more, the corners of his mouth twitching into something like a grin before he barked. The sound was sharp enough to make both you and Egg stumble back, as you laughed at the boy who thought he was being serious.

You laughed until the man disappeared. Then, the moment faded and the weight returned.

You think back to moments ago, the aspect of becoming known grew closer now that your family arrived. You touched the hair at your nape, fingers lingering where silver hid beneath dye, and the fortune teller’s words burned in your memory.

Egg nudged your side, a small reminder that you weren’t completely alone, but even his presence couldn’t cut through the weight pressing at your chest. 

“Market?” you asked, quietly. “I am still hungry.”

Egg shook his head, though his stomach betrayed him. He followed as you turned, moving into the press of bodies, the noise swallowing you whole.

Vendors called out prices, children laughed, iron rang as a smith tested a blade, and the air smelled of saltfish, honeyed bread, and something fried you couldn’t name.

You moved fast, too fast. Egg hurried to keep up, small boots skidding over cobbles, weaving between legs with the ease of someone used to being overlooked. He stayed close to your side, close enough that his sleeve brushed yours whenever the crowd surged.

“My lady…” he began.

You winced and rubbed at your temples, the dull ache flaring. “Don’t,” you said quietly. “You don’t have to jest anymore, Egg. No one here is listening.”

“Fine,” he said softly. “Sister.”

“I only mean,” you said more carefully, “I know you have your reasons for hiding. But coming here alone.” You glanced around as if the stalls themselves might be listening. “It was dangerous. You had no one watching you.”

“But you’re doing it.” Egg tilted his head up, meeting your eyes. For a moment, it was like looking into a looking glass, same stubborn spark. “You came alone, too.”

You didn’t answer right away. You stopped at a stall selling sugared figs and twisted pastries, their glaze catching the sun. The vendor smiled at you.

“Two?” he asked.

You nodded and passed a coin across, then handed one to Egg. He took it with both hands, reverent, like it was something precious.

“It’s different,” you said as you started walking again. “No one is hunting me. You are a prince of the realm.” You lowered your voice. “Once Father realizes you never showed up, they will look. Everywhere.”

Egg picked at the pastry, not eating it yet. “They won’t find me.”

You snorted softly. “You’re terrible at staying put.”

That earned a smile, quick and bright, but it faded just as fast.

You reached up, fingers brushing the brown strands at your nape out of habit.

“You’re too young,” you said, softer now. “No matter how old you feel. You shouldn’t have to make these decisions, to run away.”

Egg finally took a bite, sugar dusting his lip. He swallowed hard. “But I’m not alone. I have you.” Then, quickly, like he was afraid the words might vanish, “And Ser Duncan.”

You could hear Dunk in your head, his sigh, his worry, his voice.

“Does he matter to you?” Egg asked suddenly.

The question caught you off guard.

“He’s good,” you said after a moment. 

“There's nothing else you feel?” He pressed on.

You stop. “What are you trying to imply?”

“Nothing that you already don't know.” 

You huff, not taking his words seriously. “What I do know is that he’ll be hurt when he learns we lied.”

Egg frowned, just for a moment. Then he nodded, like it was something that could be dealt with later.

“We can be happy,” Egg pressed on. “Just for a while. The three of us. I know it was reckless, but I couldn’t stay with Daeron.” His voice grew, cracking as it did. 

Your chest tightened; it was a child’s dream, happiness.

“Sister,” he said, barely above a whisper. “I don’t mean to hide forever. You know that.”

You stopped beside a stall selling wooden toys, little knights with chipped paint, dragons with snapped wings. You crouched so you were level with him, the crowd flowing around you like a river around a stone.

“As long as you listen,” you said. “As long as you do what we tell you. Then nothing has to change.”

The words felt heavy as lead. Egg’s eyes filled instantly. He nodded, fierce and earnest, then stepped forward and clutched at your skirts, just as he had when he was smaller, when the world had been simpler and safer.

You rested a hand on his head, steadying him, shielding him from the noise and the light. “Let’s go back.”

You and Egg sat beneath the tree, waiting for Dunk. Your fingers twisted through your hair, restless, trying to distract yourself from the ache at your temples.

“Does your head still trouble you, sister?”

Egg’s eyes were soft, steady.

“How did you know that?” you asked, leaning a little closer.

“You always look so,” he hesitated, searching for the right word, “so troubled when it aches.”

“You’re cleverer than you ought to be,” you said, a small smile touching your lips.

After a while, Dunk returned, nearly running, his face alight with triumph. “It worked!”

Without warning, he scooped you up, twirling you around. “It worked! They listened to me. You blessed woman, how did you know that would work?”

For a moment, you felt the familiar warmth of his body, and then he set you down, cheeks pink as he realized what he had done.

“I had meant to find Lord Ashford,” he continued, words tumbling over each other, “but the princes were there. And Prince Baelor—he was fair! He remembered Ser Arlan and didn’t even scold me when I stumbled over my words or said the wrong thing.”

You let out a cheer. “I do not know. I merely guessed they would have little choice but to hear you.”

It was not quite the whole truth. Of all your family, your uncle Baelor was the most even-handed, with a heart generous enough to listen to anyone.

“There's something in the grounds I wanted to show you two, come with me.” The man led you back into the bustle of the day. Today, you learned from Dunk that the first round would commence.

You and Egg followed Dunk to a yellow tent, filled with noise and color, laughter and movement. The canvas walls rippled slightly in the wind, and the smell of wax and timber drifted faintly from the stage inside. Your brother broke away from you at once, vanishing into a crowd of children who sat cross-legged and wide-eyed before the puppet stage. You and Dunk lingered at the opening of the tent.

“Wow,” you let out.

It was a spectacle unlike anything you had ever seen. Life-sized puppets moved with startling grace, their strings glinting in the sunlight, shadows dancing across the crowd as elaborate sets unfolded behind them. The story was lively and clear enough to hold even the adults in place.

You split your attention between the show and Egg, making sure he was staying close.

Dunk’s eyes brightened as he looked between you and Egg, who was talking to a few girls. The expression on your face made his heart beat faster; it was almost maternal the way you attended to his squire.

When the play ended, and the crowd dispersed back into the tourney grounds, Dunk motioned for both of you to follow him. He led you to one of the performers.

A woman, who had a striking sort of beauty, she had long curls gathered into a loose braid. Decorative earrings caught the light, and a flowing blue shawl draped around her shoulders. She stood tall, only a few inches shorter than Dunk himself. As you got closer you could smell the faint scent of incense seemed to cling to her.

You watched as Dunk fumbled in his pockets for coins, eventually pressing two into her hand—one for today’s performance, one for last night’s. Your eyes twitched at the interaction, you hadn’t known he’d attended then, a small curiosity pricking your chest.

“That was great,” Egg said eagerly. “How’d you do the fire tricks?”

The woman spoke and demonstrated, tossing a handful of pollen over a nearby candle. The flame flared suddenly, bright and alive. You instinctively stepped back, your skin prickling at the sudden burst of heat and light.

She brushed her hands together to remove the residue and waited.

Then, silence.

You waited. Egg waited. Even the distant murmur of the grounds seemed to dim. All of you waited for Dunk to speak, a reason why he had brought you here. But instead, he only stared at her.

It wasn’t a friendly stare, nor mean. It was something measured, intent, the same careful attention you remembered Raymun giving you long ago, and it twisted your stomach in a way you didn’t understand.

Even as Egg peppered her with questions about the puppets, Dunk didn’t break his gaze. You focused on the stitching of your sleeve, on the dust at your feet, on anything but the way his attention remained fixed elsewhere.

You told yourself it was foolish to notice. Foolish to care. A strange, quiet feeling made you feel invisible, like the world outside the tent had dulled.

Dunk spoke, but his words didn’t reach you as he lifted his shield, gesturing for the woman to examine it. How odd, to feel sharp jealousy when you had no claim to him at all.

Egg tugged gently at your cloak, looking up at you. That broke the spell. Now, Dunk was introducing himself properly, and you finally learned the woman’s name, Tanselle.

“Are you all right?” Egg asked quietly.

You swallowed, forcing the feeling down before it could take shape. “Yes.”

When you tuned back in, you learned that Dunk had given Tanselle his shield so she might paint it and design a sigil of his own. And you told yourself, firmly, that whatever that feeling had been, it meant nothing at all.

And now you could finally leave.

When you moved on to the next stretch of the grounds, you found yourself unusually quiet.

A makeshift bar tent stood nearby, crowded with tables and patrons pressed close together, one side left open to the fields beyond. The smell of cider and roasting meat drifted on the warm air. Dunk and Egg had fetched cups of it, while you chose water instead.

You all sat down on one of the benches near the tent. The wood was rough beneath your fingers, splintering faintly as you settled.

Next to you, a tug of war had broken out in the open field. Lords and common folk alike strained against the rope. Boots slipped in the churned dirt. Rank forgotten in the heat of it. Laughter and shouting carried easily on the warm air.

It was a beautiful day.

You felt none of it.

“You’re quiet,” Dunk said.

You lifted a hand to your head. “My headache, ’tis all.”

It was not the headache.

Dunk looked at you more closely then. The way you would not meet his eyes. The careful set of your mouth, as if you were holding something back. He took it for embarrassment, perhaps lingering discomfort from the drinks the night before.

“You sure?” he asked.

“I’ll refill your cups,” you said quickly. “I need more water anyway.”

Before either of them could answer, you took their mugs from the table and disappeared into the tent.

Dunk watched you go, unsettled. After a moment, he turned to Egg, who was still staring after you, his expression tight with something like disappointment.

“Did I say something?” Dunk asked.

“Yes,” Egg replied. “You did a lot of saying.”

That only left Dunk more confused.

He felt stupid standing there with empty hands and no understanding of what he had done wrong. He had warned you before that he was no good with people. Words often came out wrong, or not at all. Still, after all the time you had spent together, he had thought he might be doing better.

He tried to think it through.

Nothing had happened. All he had done was talk to the puppet girl, Tanselle. Or tried to. He always got tripped up around women, especially the pretty ones like you.

He had not meant anything by it. Had not even realized there was something to mean. Still, a small knot of unease twisted in his chest, a quiet worry that perhaps he had crossed some unseen line, though he could not say how or why.

You foolish, foolish girl. Stop this worrying. The words pounded in your head as you walked back over to your table. But when you returned, your companions were nowhere to be seen until you heard intense shouting.

Fearing for the worst, you walked over quickly, only to find your boys engaged in a tug of war with Lyonel Baratheon of all people. Suddenly, he walked out of his spot, making his team and the audience that crowded around them all groan. The man taunted them, saying he’d only be a second.

But you didn't expect him to find himself in front of you.

“Hello, my lord,” you greeted.

“My dear!” He reached out in a grand, theatrical gesture. “You were incredible, absolutely marvelous! I’ve never seen a woman take charge like that.”

“Thank you, my lord,” you said, glancing at all the new eyes on you. “I don’t remember much of last night.”

Lyonel grinned. “Neither do I.” He leaned closer, placing his rugged hands on your shoulders with a friendly, warm squeeze. “But I remember you. You are welcome in my tent, anytime.”

Dunk’s eyes flicked toward Lyonel, a faint tightening at his jaw and a shadow crossing his expression, though he forced himself to return his attention to the rope.

“Thank you. But uhm, the game?” you reminded.

“Oh, right,” Lyonel said while stepping back, hands loose on the rope.

Boots sank into the dirt as they continued to battle. Shouts and laughter carried across the field.

Egg, tiny as he was, ended up wrapped at the front, gripping the rope like a stubborn knot. His little legs wobbled, heels digging in, but he wouldn’t let go. “I’ve got this!” he shouted, voice high but fierce.

You pressed your hands to your mouth, eyes wide. “Hold on, Egg!” you called, though your voice barely reached him over the roar of the crowd.

Lyonel’s arms strained beside him, fingers white around the rope. Your eyes traced the line of Dunk’s arms, broad and corded with strength, and a quiet warmth settled in your chest at the thought of just how steady he could hold anything, even a storm of shouting men. He was the anchor, immovable, steadying the pull of the others with an ease that made your heart beat faster just watching him.

The opposing team pulled with all their might. Boots slipped in the dirt, dust rising in soft clouds. The rope jerked, then slackened, then snapped taut again. Inch by inch, Lyonel’s team gained ground.

Egg squealed as the rope tipped in their favor, but he was no longer on the ground; he was wrapped in rope. “We’re winning! We’re winning!”

Dunk grunted, muscles straining, leaning back like a steadfast tree. Lyonel followed, matching him step for step. Egg bounced slightly as he fought to stay on. You leaned forward instinctively, gripping the edge of your dress as if your own strength might somehow help.

Then, with a final, mighty pull, the rope lunged forward. The other team stumbled, groaning as the rope went free. The crowd erupted. You gasped, running forward, heart pounding, drawn in by the rush of triumph.

People surged around the victors. Dunk stood tall, chest heaving, a shy grin on his face. Lyonel pumped a fist in the air. Egg tumbled backward, laughing and breathless, then the two men helped him to his feet.

Everyone clapped and shouted, swept up in the celebration. Strangers slapped the victors’ backs, and children danced around their legs.

Egg looked up at Dunk and Lyonel, eyes sparkling. “We did it! We actually did it!”

Dunk lifted him onto his shoulders, steadying the boy as the crowd roared around them. Lyonel shouted beside them, his laughter loud and full. You laughed too, swept into it, letting yourself be part of the moment without touching the rope.

After the tug of war, the sky darkened, and the crowd began to thin, drifting off to prepare for the tourney. Even Lyonel, still flushed from exertion, asked if he might count on you to cheer for him and receive your favor. You gave a polite but firm reply, stating that your favor was reserved for your knight alone.

Dunk’s chest swelled with pride at your words, a bright grin spreading across his face, before he scuttled off toward a blacksmith to discuss armor, shoulders squared with quiet purpose. 

After Dunk disappeared toward the blacksmith, Egg tugged lightly at your sleeve. “Shall we… wait somewhere?” he asked, glancing around at the thinning crowd.

You nodded, scanning the grounds until you spotted a smaller, quieter barish tent tucked a little way off from the main bustle. It smelled faintly of apples and damp straw, a little dim inside, with rough-hewn benches and a few patrons murmuring. You led the way, holding Egg’s hand so he didn’t get lost in the remaining crowd.

Once seated, Egg fiddled with the hem of his tunic, still glowing from the tug of war. “I’ve never been part of anything like that,” he admitted, voice small. “It was… thrilling, though. Terrifying too.”

You smiled faintly, taking a sip of water. “You were brave. You held your ground.”

Egg’s eyes brightened. “I wanted to make you proud.”

You shook your head gently. “You don’t need to prove anything to me. Or to anyone.”

A pause fell, broken only by the distant shouts and laughter from the outside. Egg looked up at you, curious. “Do you think… Dunk was proud?”

You let your fingers brush his hair back. “He always is. Even when he doesn’t say it outright.”

Raymun passed by you, moving quickly through the tent; you only recognized him by the glint of his colors and the house sigil embroidered on his shirt. You called out, your tone light, friendly, carrying over the hum of the grounds. He froze mid-step, as if something invisible had struck him, eyes flicking toward you with surprise.

He almost ran over to you thats how fast he came over.

“My lady! Fancy seeing you.” He cheered.

“Egg, this is Raymun Fossoway, a squire to his cousin. Raymun, this is Dunk’s squire, Egg.”

The man shook the boy's tiny hand with ease. “This tent is produced by my house.”  He gestured grandly to the stalls and tables set with crates and baskets. “Would you– would you two want to sample some products. On the house, of course. I would love to know what you think.”

Before you could reply, he waved to a pair of workers, and they began setting out an array of apples, pastries, and small bottles of cider and juice. The smell was sweet and crisp, drifting over the warm air of the tourney grounds.

Egg’s eyes lit up immediately. “We get to taste them all?” he asked, bouncing on the balls of his feet.

“Yes,” Raymun said, a big, cute smile appearing on his face. “And I expect honest answers on what your favorite is.”

The two of you could have eaten until you barfed; everything was amazing. Egg was halfway through a small basket of spiced apples puffs, licking his fingers with delight, while you sampled each one carefully, savoring the different flavors.

“I’m telling you, this one has just the right snap,” Egg said, holding it up like a trophy.

“You’ve said that about three already,” you teased, reaching for a small pastry. “All of them have snap. You just like to be dramatic.”

Egg grinned, unconcerned, and took another bite. “Well, they are different! You have to taste carefully.”

You laughed softly, leaning back against into your chair.

“So,” Egg said after a moment, crumbs on his lips, “if we’re in here until the tourney starts… do you think we could sneak in another basket of apples? And more treats.”

“Maybe,” you said, reaching for another apple.

Egg made a solemn vow with a dramatic gesture, his tiny fists raised. “We have to save some for Ser Dunk.”

You smiled, shaking your head. “If you don't eat it all.”

Dunk looked around, puzzled at where the two of you went, entering tents, looking around the grounds. Only stumbling upon your tent when he was out of ideas. He watched as you two talked, food plastered all over your table. Food that had to cost money.

Dunk stepped inside, eyes sweeping over the food. His brows lifted in mild surprise. “Where did all this come from?”

You smiled, brushing crumbs from your hands. “Raymun gave it to us. This is a Fossoway tent. He said we could try everything.”

Dunk’s mouth twitched at the corner, a small, approving grin forming. Without a word, he moved closer, pulling up a chair and sitting down as he leaned in to take a slice of pastry.

Egg held one up dramatically. “This one! This one is the best!”

You reached for the same one. “No way. That’s too sweet. This one’s perfect,” you countered, waving the pastry like a flag.

Egg gasped, eyes wide. “You are wrong! Absolutely, completely wrong!”

You laughed, reaching for another treat. “And you are stubborn. Everyone knows it.”

“Not stubborn! Precision! Technique!” he insisted, pounding a tiny fist on the table for emphasis.

The argument went back and forth, rising in mock intensity, until Dunk finally leaned over, resting his large hands on the table with a grin that made both of you pause. “Now,” he rumbled, voice low but firm, “let’s settle this properly.”

You both looked up at him, waiting.

Dunk picked up one of the pastries, took a deliberate bite, and chewed thoughtfully. “Huh. That one’s too sweet. That one,”—he gestured at another—“needs more spice. But this one here,” he said, pointing, “perfect balance. You’re both wrong about the others.”

Egg’s jaw dropped. “He chose mine!”

You huffed, crossing your arms. “That’s only because he’s biased.”

Dunk grinned, swallowing. “Aye. But it’s the truth.”

You and Egg exchanged a quick, conspiratorial glance, then both laughed once again, the warm sound filling the quiet tent. 

Dunk’s eyes lingered on you for a moment, the way your laugh mirrored Egg’s little bursts of delight. He couldn’t help the faint thought that crossed his mind, how much you two looked alike when you were caught up in something you loved. Not just in expression, but in the lightness of it, the way joy seemed to animate every small gesture. He shook his head slightly, dismissing it, but the image stayed with him as he leaned back in his chair, watching the two of you savor the moment.

“You know, the old man lived nigh on sixty years and was never a champion. If I could call myself a champion of Ashford Meadow, even for an hour, maybe some great house might take me into its service,” Dunk added.

“Perhaps even House Targaryen.”

The two of you slowed your eating, caught up in the thought.

“You suppose the dragon house employs many hedge knights, Ser?” You nudged Egg lightly on the shins for his words.

“Enough of that,” Dunk grumbled. “I’ll have you know I ran into Ser Donnel of the Kingsguard, and he’s but a son of the crabber.”

Your expression tightened as you knowingly gritted your teeth. “Ser Donnel of Duskendale?” you whispered.

“Yeah!”

“His father owns half the crabbing fleets in Westeros,” Egg stated, matter-of-factly.

Dunk’s face dropped. “What! How would you know?”

“I like fishing,” Egg said, shrugging.

Before Dunk could dive deeper, he was cut off by the loud screech of a horn. All across the grounds, people broke into cheers.

“It’s time!” Egg called out.

Dunk stood first. “Right. Come on, let’s go.”

You and Egg followed after him, but he moved too fast. “Come on, pick your feet up. Let’s go!”

“Egg, stay close,” you said, extending a hand. The boy grabbed on, and the two of you ran after Dunk.

The horn blew again, and suddenly the roads were crowded, no space left empty.

“Wait!” Egg shouted as Dunk’s silhouette moved farther and farther ahead.

You looked around. “Duncan!”

He turned at the sound of your voice and quickly ran back. Noticing your struggle, Dunk lifted Egg with ease and set him on his shoulders, then took your hand firmly so he would not lose you again. You neared the tourney grounds moments later.

An area that had only been set up the day before was now crawling with people.

“You all right, you two?” he asked, his words dripping with care.

“Yeah,” you replied.

Instead of sunlight, candles illuminated the jousters as they prepared. You finally settled into the crowd, pushing toward the front of the commons. Luckily, no one protested your cutting through, needing only one look at Dunk to step aside. You found yourself ushered forward by the man before him, nearly pressed to the fence that separated you from the arena.

It gave you the best view. Enough room for Dunk and Egg a few paces behind you, and close enough for Dunk to keep an eye on you, just in case.

Not just the jousters, but the crowd itself stirred your blood. Cheers and clapping rose around you, infectious. You glanced back at Dunk and Egg more than once to be sure they were still there.

When you were not looking at them, your gaze drifted to the royal box, and your body tensed. A family you had not seen in days sat there, prim and proper in red and black.

Your stomach tightened. Not at your father, but at Aerion. Your elder brother had always made you uneasy, and for good reason.

If they were closer, they could spot you.

Your attention was pulled away by a man shouting. A Tully, whose name you did not care to know, sat astride his horse only a few steps in front of you. His auburn hair shone brightly in the candlelight.

“For the old gods and the new!” he shouted, before pulling out a raw fish and biting its head clean off.

The sight nearly sent you stumbling back in disgust. You glanced at Egg instead, who was cheering at the madness. You decided this must simply be normal tourney behavior.

The Tully quickly disappeared, rejoining the others as they prepared. Then it began. Squires shouted at, lances and shields rushed into waiting hands. Horses neighed as if they sensed battle.

You watched the knights line up one by one. The Tully. Lyonel. A Hightower. Leo Tyrell. Two Ashfords. One figure stood out to you in particular.

“Hey, who’s that?” Dunk called to Egg.

“Prince Valarr, Baelor’s son. Second in line to the throne,” Egg replied.

The mild-mannered boy you had grown up with shared your fascination with tourneys. Your cousin was one of the few you would willingly seek out whenever he visited Summerhall, or when you were sent to Dragonstone.

You had never truly considered that they all began on the same field like this, even with all your knowledge of tourneys.

A hush fell over the crowd once the line was set and all was ready.

“Lord Ashford fucks his sheep!” a man beside you yelled.

Laughter erupted at once. Even a few lords and ladies in the high box failed to suppress their amusement as Lord Ashford squirmed in his seat.

The horn blared again, and the jousters charged. It was hard to track every match at once, but when lances shattered on impact, the crowd roared, and you with them. The knights shouted for fresh lances, their squires scrambling to obey.

As you watched, a thought crept into your mind. You did not know everything about being a squire, but the work was clearly not easy. It would be harder still for someone as small as Egg to manage Dunk’s lance and shield. The man was tall enough on foot, even more so atop Thunder.

Egg seemed to be thinking the same when he asked for Dunk to set him down before the next charge. As the knights thundered forward again, you felt a small tug at your sleeve. Egg wanted to stand beside you.

“Don’t be discouraged. You can do this as well as any other squire,” you said, rubbing his head. The boy straightened with pride.

Valarr struck the Hightower clean from his horse. You found the irony hard to miss, given your house’s history. But the green knight did not merely fall. He flew, crashing through the dividing fence and tumbling into Lyonel’s path.

You shut your eyes as the horse nearly landed atop him, missing by inches. You grimaced when Lyonel was struck by his opponent’s lance moments later and also went down, splintering another section of fence.

Dunk pressed in close behind you, his large hands settling carefully on your shoulders. He and Egg shouted in awe, unconcerned. But your eyes widened as Ser Humfrey Hardyng, who had been on the ground seconds before, reappeared mounted once more.

Then you felt Dunk’s hands tense. You turned to see him breathing too fast, his eyes darting between the horses, you, and Egg.

You took his left hand and held it close. “Breathe,” you said softly, showing him how. After a few moments, he followed your lead and steadied, murmuring an apology. You only shook your head.

“Even brave knights get frightened sometimes.”

He nearly beamed.

The rest of the tourney went without issue. And when it was over, everyone rushed back to their tents. You were so tired you don’t even remember who won.

Egg ran ahead of you on the walk back to camp, still cheering.

“Would you like me to carry you, m’lady?” Dunk asked.

Your face warmed. “Why by the Seven would I make you do that?” you laughed, uneasy.

“Because I did it last night,” he said, as if it were nothing.

You pause.

“Duncan, stop me if you ever see me drinking like that again,” you muttered.

He only laughed, guiding you forward with a gentle hand.

Even back at camp, Egg was still brimming with energy. Wanting to tire him out, you indulged him, sparring with sticks as he pretended to fight in the Blackfyre Rebellion.

“Take that!” he squeaked. “Die! Do you yield, Blackfyre bastards?”

“Never!” You shouted back.

With the fire crackling and the sound of your play, you almost missed how quiet Dunk had become. You tapped Egg lightly on the head to draw his attention.

“Are you well, Dunk?” you called.

When he didn't respond, you looked at Egg to add on. “Splendid riding tonight. Mm, the part with the fish was disgusting.” 

“Aye.” You replied.

Still no response. Dunk stared into the dark.

Then he spoke. “Do great knights live in hedges and die beside muddy roads?”

Sorrow stirred at the mention of his old Ser.

“I think not,” he went on. “Ser Arlan was no great swordsman or lancer. He drank. He whored. He was hard to know and harder to like. He made no friends. Lived nigh on sixty years and was never a champion.”

He swallowed. “What chance do I have, truly?”

You and Egg drew closer to hear him. Though the fire burned bright, it felt as though his light dimmed.

“But he was good to me,” Dunk said quietly. “I was not his blood, but he kept me as though I were. He raised me to be honorable. And all these noble lords cannot even remember his name.”

He paused.

“His name was Ser Arlan of Pennytree. And I am his legacy. On the morrow, we will show them what his hand has wrought.”

You realized then how wrong you had been. The memory of his ser did not dim his fire. It fed it. And with it burning so bright, you had no doubt he would become one of the greatest knights the realm would ever know.

The pavilion smelled of poultice and blood. Dunk stood with his hands jammed into his armpits as if doing so would help him stay together. He was much too big for the space and far too helpless in it, every shift seemed to make the ground give way.

Prince Baelor lay on a low bed with blankets folded under his shoulders to keep him from rolling, though in truth the Prince had yet to show a single sign of life other than breathing. His head was turned to the side as to not put pressure on the affliction, his hair had been shorn where the blow had struck and the clean linen protecting the area was already turning pink at the centre.

The maester had washed the blood away and tried to staunch it as much as he could by filling the space, but Dunk could still see the shape of it in his mind, an ugly cavity where a skull ought to be smooth.

"Will this help?" a voice asked, too young and trying not to sound it.

Egg stood by the bed, clutching a folded cloth as if it were a sword. His eyes were fixed on his Uncle's face with a stubborn kind of fury, as though staring hard enough might keep the man tethered to this world.

The maester's mouth tightened. "It may ease his pain, if he feels any. That is all."

Prince Valarr was on the other side of the bed. He had not sat, or leaned, he stood straight-backed in his doublet as if he were already in a sept, made of marble like the statues of dead kings. His hands betrayed him, knuckles white with his fingers curled around nothing.

"He feels," Valarr said, voice quiet and uncharacteristically weak for a prince. It wasn't a question, it was a demand that could not be met.

The maester glanced at the bandages and Dunk saw something like fear flicker across the old man's face before it disappeared behind training.

"We have done what can be done. If the gods are... merciful, he may yet return to us."

Dunk swallowed whatever he wanted to say. Can't you do anything else? The maester held Baelor's head steady while he tipped a few drops between the prince's lips, he rubbed his throat to coax a swallow that came sloe and half-wrong. A thin line of liquid dribbled down his chin which was swiped away with a piece of linen.

"You'll save him," Egg said suddenly, and it came out harsh and brave. Desperate all the same. "You have to."

The maester's gaze slid past him, past Dunk, to Valarr. For a heartbeat his face softened, as if he wanted to say something kinder for a son watching his father die. What came out was the truth, plain and simple.

"We will keep him comfortable, we will watch, we will pray. If he is to live, it would not be by my hand alone."

Valarr remained steadfast but he stared down at his father with an expression Dunk couldn't begin to name. Grief, yes. But there was something else threaded through it, something that made the air brittle. Guilt? Perhaps, it was Valarr's armour that guarded Baelor, his armour that failed and allowed the injury to occur. But Valarr had not swung the mace. That was Maekar.

Dunk had seen it happen in a flash of panic and steel, Maekar trying to reach for Aerion. Striking his brother with a blow that was meant to deter.

Egg made a thin, furious noise. "There has to be-"

"There is not," the maester resigned.

Dunk's hands suddently felt enormous and useless, his thoughts scrambled for something, anything, that could make a difference. But he only had a sword at his hip and the certainty that steel was of no use against a broken skull.

Dunk stumbled out into the cold air as if fleeing smoke. The sky was darker now. He sucked in a breath and it tasted of mud and fear. There was nothing to be done. Prince Baelor would die. And he would die for Duncan.

Just when all hope seemed lost, the horizon opened for him.

Perched on a line of Baelor's pavillion as if it belonged there was a crow, black feathers slick against the twilight. It should have been a dark omen, an animal of death appearing at Baelor's bed but this crow was special.

It did not hop away when Dunk stepped closer, it only watched with a bright knowing eye, head cocked.

This one had a pale scar along its beak like a scratch left by an old knife. He had seen that scar before, years ago. When he had been bleeding out and feverish.

The tent rustled, and he heard Egg's voice, small now, asking something - begging perhaps. Dunk could not make out the words. The crow clicked its beak once, sharp as flint.

His hands curled into fists. He saw Ser Arlan's face as it had been when he was alive, heard his voice clearer now too.

The crow's her signature. Don't bring steel into her hollow.

Dunk looked down at his sword, one he hadn't parted from in days. His fingers unclasped the belt, he set the blade down on a crate beside the pavilion like a man laying a child to bed.

Behind him, the tent flap snapped open. Egg burst out, face puffy and blotched. He stopped when he saw Duncan without his sword. "What are you doing?" His voice more a plea than a scold. "Ser Duncan, what are you-"

Dunk pointed at the crow. "You see that?" He needed to check that his mind wasn't conjuring up images to give him hope.

Egg followed his finger. "It's a crow."

"Good, it's hers." Dunk said, surprising himself with how certain he sounded.

"Hers?" And then, because he was Egg, because he was curious even at the edge of grief. "Who are you talking about?"

"A... friend." Dunk said, awkwardly because the word was too small to describe what she had done. "A woman who... who pulled me back once when I ought to have died. A witch, maybe." She was definitely a witch but he couldn't just admit that.

Egg's eyes went huge. "A witch."

The tent shifted again, and the Young Prince stepped out into the open air. He moved like a man who had decided not to fall apart until later. His gaze flicked across their faces. "What is this?" Valarr asked.

Dunk hesitated. He could lie, say nothing. Few took happiness in the mention of witchcraft.

But inside the pavilion, Baelor was dying - because of him.

"There is someone," Dunk started. "Not far, or maybe far. I don't know. I've always been able to find her, when I needed her. Or she's found me. She's in the woods."

Valarr's face tightened at the word woods and the unspoken truth behind it. Witch.

"We have maesters," It sounded like something he'd been taught to say, something that was always worked before. "We have-"

"We have nothing that's helping him," Dunk cut it before remembering his station. "I beg your pardon, my prince."

Egg stepped between them as if he could break the tension with his small body. "If she saved you, maybe she can save him. We have to try."

Valarr looked at Egg as if seeing him for the first time, a boy with too much heart and not enough sense. "I have been told all my life to steer clear of witchcraft," He said. "That it is a lie that wears a woman's face."

Dunk went to open his mouth but Valarr held up a single, shaking finger. "But I have also been told that my father will die." The crow hopped down onto a high crate like it had been waiting too long.

Valarr's eyes flicked to it. "If there is a chance," he said, and the words cost him something. "Then I will take it, take me to your friend."

Egg latched onto Dunk's sleeve at once. "I'm coming with you, Ser Duncan."

"No," Dunk began, but Egg's grip tightened and his stubbornness flared liked a flame.

"You said she is your friend," He said fiercely. "You said she saved you. I'm coming."

Dunk looked at the boy, and felt something soft and aching in his chest. "Fine," Dunk said. "But you stay close. Do as I say and you don't touch a thing. She gets cranky when people do that."

Egg nodded quickly. "Yes, ser."

Dunk turned back to the bird, as he took a step towards the dark line of trees beyond the camp the crow lifted, flapped once, and glided ahead, low over the grass like a shadow pulling them by the hand.

Dunk set his jaw and followed it into the trees, Egg hurried to keep up. Valarr's footsteps fell behind them, measured, as if a prince could walk into a witchwood without letting fear show on his face.

The woods took them the way deep water takes a stone, quietly, without hurry, like it had been waiting. Somewhere above, something skittered along bark, quick as lightning.

The crow had disappeared some time ago, every now and then Duncan could've sworn he saw it swoop through the trees in his peripherals but everytime he turned to look, it was gone.

Egg kept close at Dunk's elbow. The knight could tell he was trying to be brave in the way all boys did, too quietly, as if the silence could protect him. Even Valarr, who Dunk had never talked to outside of a few hours ago, was walking closer.

"You said she saved you," Egg whispered, like speaking too loudly would wake what slept between the trees. "Before. You said you ought... to have died."

"Aye," he said. "I was four and ten."

Egg glanced up at him, eyes wide. "How did you get hurt?"

Dunk's thoughts snagged on the old pain. He remembered the taste of blood in his mouth, the way the world had blurred and faded and the last thought he had. So this is what death feels like.

"We were on the road," he said slowly. "The memories of that time are fuzzy. I can't remember the place's name. Some men thought an old knight and a young squire would be easy pickings. They were wrong about Ser Arlan being easy." His voice tightened as he continued. "But they had more knives than we had luck."

Valarr's footsteps drew closer, maybe he wanted to hear to story. To be reassured that this woman could save his father.

"One of them caught me. I got two blades, something in me ruptured. Internal bleeding, she said. I remember falling, I couldn't breathe proper and blood was coming up from my lungs. Ser Arlan tried to keep me awake and stop the blood but it kept coming."

Egg swallowed audibly. "And he took you to her."

"That he did."

"Did he know her?"

"He did. I asked how, once. He told me that some debts are best paid quietly. I think she owed him."

Valarr spoke for the first time since they'd left camp. "What did she do?" As if the act could be measured and judged.

"She told Ser Arlan to put me down," Dunk said. "Said I needed to feel the ground under me. Made him take off his mail and set it aside. She doesn't like having steel near." Valarr's gaze moved down to where Duncan's sword ought to have been.

"Did it hurt?" Egg's voice was small.

Dunk let out a small laugh. "Yes," he said. "It hurt. But I don't think it was her doing, I think that was just my injuries. Then all of a sudden it didn't. It wasn't like she had given me milk of the poppy. It was like the pain became far off. It gave me time to think and recover my senses."

He could hear Ser Arlan's voice again, low and careful. Do as she says, lad. Don't argue. Don't touch the charms.

"She told me to keep breathing, not to try. She told me to do it, like she was pulling on the reins of a horse. And I did. Something about her made me do it, maybe that was the true witchcraft."

They walked on, the trees grew closer, and branches knit overhead. After a time, Egg asked, "And you've been able to find her ever since?"

Dunk's lips pressed together. "When I needed her," he said, and it sounded like superstition the moment the words left his mouth. He hated that it did, he wished for the world to be a thing you could hit with a hammer until it made sense.

"She doesn't live like other folk," he added. "Sometimes you'll happen across her like she's always been there. Sometimes you'll turn around, and she'll be right there behind you, quiet as a shadow. You don't hear her coming."

Egg looked around at the black trunks and glistening leaves, as if Dunk's words would prompt her to appear. "That's not possible."

Dunk snorted softly. "A lot of things are impossible. And yet."

Valarr's voice came again, controlled and strained. "Why does she help you if the debt's been paid?"

Dunk thought of the first time he'd met her, of Ser Arlan's face lined with worry, of him kneeling on damp earth and speaking to a girl in a low voice that carried respect. He thought of the way she'd looked at Dunk as if she were weighing him up in her mind. Not his size, but something else. Something more valuable.

"I don't know," Dunk admitted. "Maybe she liked Ser Arlan, maybe she saw something in me worth saving." He swallowed before continuing. "I know what people say of witches. That they kill without mercy, but she's not like that. Not at all. I think she just likes helping people, she hides away because she knows what people would do if they knew what she was capable of."

Bringing people back from the brink of death. Valarr and Egg thought to themselves. A powerful skill, what else was she capable of? She must be one powerful witch. If it is true, she would be caged by some high lord. Forced to do their bidding over and over again.

Egg's pace quickened by half a step, eager despite the fear. "What is she like?"

"She's... calm." He said. "Not meek or anxious. She doesn't take insults from anyone, she'll give some remark or just stare at you like she's counting your bones. She feels deeply for people, perhaps more deeply than anyone I've met. But she hides that part. Sometimes, she laughs at things that aren't funny. That always made me feel like she knows something I don't...though, I am fairly certain she can see the future."

Egg shivered, from the cold or excitement, Dunk couldn't tell. "And she has a crow," Egg said, like that made it all more real.

"Aye, that one." Dunk looked to the sky as if the bird would appear. "Keep your coins, brooches, and chains hidden. It will steal anything shiny it can get its mouth around to give to her as a gift, as long as it's not steel. She keeps them as a collection."

"You're certain she can save him," Valarr spoke, now fully alongside them. It wasn't really a question, more of a line he was trying to hold.

Dunk wanted to say yes. To swear on his sword that his father would be safe for both Baelor's sake and Valarr's. "I don't believe her crow would come if there was nothing to be done. Besides, I'm certain the maesters can do nothing. And I'm certain she's done what shouldn't be possible before."

Valarr's breath hissed through his teeth, a sound like steel being drawn. Suddenly, a crow's call was heard ahead of them, it reverberated through the forest. Its wings could be heard beating, once, twice, as it disappeared into a deeper pocket of the dark. Dunk's heart lurched.

Egg grabbed his sleeve. "Ser Duncan-".

"There," Dunk said, though he had no reason to know yet. Something in him remembered this feeling, stumbling through the trees with blood spewing from his mouth and Ser Arlan's voice in his ear.

He pushed on, faster now. Branches snagged at Valarr's cloak as he followed behind closely. The trees thinned as if the forest was making space. The clearing was not empty.

Trinkets hung from the branches, strips of cloth, bones bleached white, little bundles of herbs, and twigs that had been arranged into symbols. They swung with the breeze that ran through the area.

Then the wind stopped as if the life had been sucked out of the clearing, and all fell silent.

As if the forest had exhaled her, she was there. Not a crunch of leaves or a snap of branches. Just there, in the alcove of a tree, watching them as if she'd been waiting for hours.

The crow was settled on her thigh, and Dunk's heart thudded painfully in his chest.

"You three are late." Your voice was as soft as moss, it hadn't changed since Dunk had last seen you.

He found his tongue at last. "Prince Baelor," He managed, the sound came out like a prayer and an apology. "He's-"

"I know," She said as she lifted herself from the ground, swiping any dirt away from her clothes.

Her eyes were on Dunk, but he had this sudden, unsettling feeling that she was looking through him, past him, all the way to the pavilion and the dying man inside.

She moved as though she belonged. Certain of herself and her abilities. Dunk had always felt clumsy compared to her, all boots and breath and loud human warmth.

Egg's gaze flicked over her abode. "You..." he began, then faltered, as if he weren't sure what to say. "You knew we were coming."

The witch's mouth curved. "Of course, I knew."

Valarr stepped forward a half pace. "How?" His voice was polite but bordering on anxious. "No one in camp sent word. No rider-"

"No," You agreed softly. Your gaze slid to him, taking him in the way you'd taken Dunk in years ago. "No rider would have reached me in time."

Egg blurted, "Then how?"

You tipped her head, considering whether the question deserved a serious answer before shrugging and saying, very simply. "The wind told me."

"The wind... doesn't talk." Egg frowned.

"It does, to us witches at least." There was a quiet finality that made the argument seem childish.

Dunk felt Valarr's stare, sharp and disbelieving yet so desperate. The prince's lips pressed into a line, as if he were reciting all the lessons he'd been taught about women in woods. Dunk could see the battle inside him, between what he'd been told and what he wanted.

No, what he needed.

Dunk looked at the trinkets laid out around her. "You've been... preparing." He nodded at the items.

Your eyes softened for a second. "I set out what I would need," you said. "How far is the prince?"

"Not too far," Dunk answered, looking back the way they came.

"He's sinking. I can feel it. And you wouldn't have come to me if he weren't."

Egg's breath caught, "Can you save him?"

The witch looked at the young boy before her. Your gaze was fond, sad and wary as the same. "He is not yours," you said gently. "Yet you are afraid for him all the same."

Egg's cheeks went red. "He's good." He said fiercely. "He- he didn't deserve this."

"No one deserves this." You murmured. "Perhaps, besides your elder brother. His soul has been consumed by the Targaryen madness."

Valarr's voice came out tight. "If you can help him. Then name your price."

"I do not bargain like a merchant over a dying man." You said, though there was no cruelty to be found in your voice. You looked at each of them individually before continuing. "Bring me to him. Now."

Your hands were stained, not with blood but with old green smears. Crushed herbs, perhaps, or something else. There were cuts along your fingers that were half-healed as though you'd been working for hours.

"You really knew?" Dunk said quietly.

You walked past him, carrying your copious amount of supplies. "I told you...the wind."

Egg hurried to keep up. "What did it say?"

"It said a good man was being taken." You replied. "It said that two young princes would follow a knight true at heart. It said grief would come hidden behind duty."

The path back was not the same path in reverse. Dunk was sure of it. The trees had shifted. The ground rose where it had been flat. He would have been lost in minutes, but the crow flew overhead, and the woman followed it without a moment of hesitation.

Valarr watched her hands, he didn't want to look too closely at her eyes no matter how welcoming they seemed. He watched her hands instead because they seemed safer.

Her hands were full.

A bowl was held carefully against her hip, a small bundle of different herbs tied with twine in the other. A pouch at her belt bumped softly with each step, heavy with whatever she'd packed, chalk, charcoal, bones, stones and perhaps even teeth. Strips of cloth were folded and tucked under her elbow, even the crow seemed to add weight, hopping from branch to branch over her.

Valarr's throat worked. He had been told, like many other followers of the Seven, that women like this were snares. That you did not speak too freely to them. That you did not accept gifts, and you did not offer help, because that would be an invitation, and that could become a binding.

But then he glanced ahead, imaging his father's tent, the way the man's chest barely rose. And teachings, for all their weight and worth, did not keep a man alive.

She stepped over a root without looking, like she knew where it would be before it was there. Her balance was too sure for someone carrying so much.

Still.

Valarr could not stand behind her like a boy being led. He had to do something with his hands, if only to stop him from thinking of what fate awaits his beloved father.

He moved closer, careful not to brush her sleeve. His voice came out steadier than he felt it. "- My lady." The words tasted strange in his mouth. He had addressed ladies of court with silks and jewels and perfumed hair. This woman smelled of damp earth, which actually might've been more appealing than the perfume, to be honest.

You did not slow or turn your head. "I'm no lady."

Valarr's ears warmed, but he kept walking alongside you, matching your pace. "Then..." He swallowed and cursed himself for fumbling like a squire. "Then-"

Your eyes flicked to him briefly, quick and assessing. "Then speak... my prince."

"You are... carrying a great deal." He gestured, awkwardly, at the bowl, the bundles, at everything. "Might I carry something?"

For a heartbeat, he thought she might laugh. Instead, she looked ahead and said nothing at all.

He held his hands out slightly, palms open, in the universal posture of 'I mean no harm'. It felt ridiculous.

"I can carry the bowl," he added quickly, before pride could choke him. "Or the cloth. Whatever you wish."

She slowed then, and her gaze slid to his hands. He got that odd feeling that he was being tested. "You're afraid of me." You stated. It was not an accusation, it was an observation.

Valarr's jaw tightened. Lying would be pointless. "Yes."

"And still you offer."

"Yes," he said again, because there was no other answer. His voice dropped without his permission. "Because my father is dying."

You made a quiet sound, almost a sign, almost a snort, and adjusted your grip. "You've been taught to fear us." Then again, though you look more amused now. "And it is not just because your father is dying."

Valarr's brows drew together. He kept his hand out anyway, stubbornly open. "Then why?" He asked, and it came out more honest than princely. "Why would I-"

She didn't look at him when she answered. Her eyes stayed on the path. "Because you're a good person," she said simply.

The words landed wrong, like a cloak thrown over him that doesn't quite fit. Valarr almost stumbled on a root he didn't see. "I-" he began, then stopped. Praise from courtiers was easy, they always wanted something. This didn't sound like that.

The witch glanced back at him then. "Don't argue. It's clear as day." She looked at the space around him, over his shoulder, as if searching.

Valarr looked down. "You don't know me."

"I can see it. Do not tell me what I can and cannot see. It's right there." You gestured around him. "You cannot escape it."

He forced himself to stay calm. "What," he said, carefully, "is there?"

You exhaled through her nose, the smallest hint of impatience. "Your aura," she said, like naming it made it easier to understand. "The shape of you."

Valarr stared at her profile, trying to decide if this was some trick meant to unsettle him. "That's not a thing."

"It's a thing," she replied. "It's just not something people are taught to notice. But some people are more sensitive to them. Have you ever gotten a bad feeling about someone you've just met? It's similar, just deeper."

He frowned. "An aura."