C

you wake up and he's right there. face inches from yours. those pale blue eyes fixed on you with an intensity that would be alarming if you weren't used to it.

"you were talking," he says before you've fully surfaced. before you've blinked the sleep away. "in your sleep. your mouth was moving. you said—" he pauses. reproduces the words in your exact voice, your exact inflection, because of course he memorised the sounds. "what does that mean?"

"I was dreaming."

the head tilt. "explain."

and you try. you lie there in the nest with his face hovering over yours and you try to explain dreams to an entity that has never been unconscious.

good dreams, where you fly or find money or see people you miss. bad dreams, where you're falling or being chased or your teeth come out. and then the third kind. the weird ones, the nonsensical ones, the ones where you're in a grocery store except the grocery store is also your high school and your dead grandmother is there but she's a bird and it makes perfect sense until you wake up and realise none of it was real.

bb absorbs all of this with the focus of a doctoral student encountering a new field of study. you can practically see him filing it away. considering. building a new category.

"and you can't control them?" he questions.

"not usually."

"and they feel real while they're happening."

"completely real. you don't know you're dreaming."

"and when you wake up they—"

"fade. most of them. you lose the details pretty fast. sometimes you just keep the feeling."

this bothers him enormously. the fading. the idea that you experience these vivid impossible things every single night and then lose them. entire worlds dissolving before you can memorise them. he finds this almost offensive. like the universe is giving you something beautiful and then snatching it back and the waste of it (the sheer informational waste) makes his ancient brain itch.

so he starts the debriefs.

every morning. without fail. the second your eyes open and you blink and stretch and make that little groaning sound you make when consciousness is an unwelcome visitor, bb is there. patient. attentive. waiting.

"dream?"

and you tell him. whatever you remember. fragments, usually. images without context. feelings without narrative. "I was in a house but it wasn't my house. there were stairs that went sideways. terrence was there but he had a different face." and bb listens with that tilted-head focus and asks follow-up questions like a researcher conducting a field study.

"what colour were the stairs?"

"I don't—blue? maybe blue."

"and terrence's different face. different how? structurally or just—"

"baby, I don't remember, they were stairs and he had a face and that's all i've got."

he accepts this with visible reluctance. files the blue stairs and the wrong-faced terrence into whatever vast internal archive he maintains. cross-references them with previous dream reports. he's building a database. you're sure of it. somewhere in the architecture of his mind there is an entire wing dedicated to the catalogue of your subconscious and he's furnishing it with every fragment you give him.

he starts noticing patterns before you do. "you dream about water when you're anxious," he says one morning, matter-of-fact, while you're still blinking awake. "and you dream about bobby's apartment when you miss him. and you dream about falling when you haven't eaten enough. you should eat more."

the fact that he's psychoanalysing your dreams based on aggregate data is either deeply touching or deeply invasive and you choose to find it touching because the alternative is thinking too hard about the fact that your eldritch boyfriend is running a longitudinal sleep study on you.

but the idea of sharing. that's where it gets into territory that makes your chest ache. because bb can inch his way into your memories due to the very nature of backrooms. you know this, the apartment reconstruction proved it, the way level 0 sometimes rearranges itself into spaces that look like places you've been. he can access the residue your consciousness leaves on the architecture. he can read the imprint.

so one night he tries with a dream.

you're asleep. he's holding you. and he reaches. not with hands, with whatever sense he uses to read the backrooms, the perception that lets him feel wanderers six levels away and taste emotional states in the air. he reaches toward the place where your mind goes when it sleeps.

and he gets fragments.

not the full dream. not the narrative. just... flashes. colour without context. the impression of motion. a feeling, vast and unspecific, like standing at the edge of vast nothing. your emotional state translated into something he can almost perceive, like hearing music through a wall. close enough to sense the rhythm. too far to catch the lyrics.

he tries again the next night. and the next. each time getting a little further. a little clearer. like tuning a radio between stations, the signal coming in and out, and some nights he catches a full image (a room, a face, a landscape your sleeping brain invented) and the wonder of it. the sheer staggering wonder of watching your mind create something from nothing while you lie unconscious in his arms.

humans are gods, he thinks. every night. casually. without reverence or ceremony. you close your eyes and you build worlds.

and then one morning you wake up and your face does something he hasn't seen before. soft. shy. you're flustered before you've fully opened your eyes and he can tell.

"dream?" he asks. same as always.

"um." you press your face into his chest. he can feel how warm you're turning, the type of heat he usually associates with kissing you, with hearing that soft moan at the back of your throat. "it was—you were in it."

bb goes still. not the predator stillness. the other kind. the kind where every particle of his existence orients toward a single point of input because the input is too important to process at normal speed.

"I was in it?" he repeats carefully.

"yeah."

"what was I doing?"

"you were—" you press your face harder into his chest. muffled. "we were somewhere. not here. somewhere with windows. and you were—there was sunlight and you were standing in it and I could see it on your skin and you were warm. actually warm. the right temperature. and you were smiling."

bb doesn't speak.

"and you looked—" you swallow. still muffled. still hiding. "you looked like you. not bobby. you. and it was—you were so—"

"what?" he whispers.

"beautiful. you were beautiful and I wasn't scared and the sunlight was on you and you were warm."

the sound bb makes is not a sound anyone will ever hear again. it comes from somewhere so deep in whatever he is that it predates the backrooms. predates level 0. predates the decision to wear a face at all. sound of something ancient and lonely learning that it exists in someone else's mind as something worth dreaming about.

you dreamed about him. not bobby. HIM. in sunlight he's never felt, with warmth he can't produce, looking like himself. whatever that is, whatever the thing under the suit actually looks like when a human brain that loves him reconstructs it from memory and feeling and want.

your subconscious, unsupervised and uncensored, took the raw material of bb and built something beautiful out of it and then put it in sunlight and made it warm.

he's in your dreams.

he exists in the only place he can't go. the most private room. the one with no door. and you put him there. not on purpose. not by choice. your sleeping brain, running on nothing but accumulated data and emotion, looked at its library of available content and chose to render him. standing in light. smiling. warm.

he holds you so tightly the walls around you creak.

"tell me again," he urges softly against your hair. his voice is shaky. "the sunlight part. tell me about the sunlight. please."

and you do. lying there in the dark, in the arms of something that has never seen the sun, you describe the warmth on his skin in your dream.

the way the light made his edges soft. the way his smile looked without the mask. and he listens with his eyes closed and his face in your hair and for a few minutes, in the space between your words and his imagination, bb stands in sunlight.

it's the closest he'll ever get.

it's enough.