The fire was crackling steadily, like static over a line, filling all the blank spaces in the room. Two faces were reflected in the firelight. One with eyes closed, leaned back into an armchair, her ears drinking in the quiet atmosphere of the room and the silence beyond. The other face gazed keenly into the fire, his eyes fierce.

A noise interrupted their reverie. The wooden door to the room was cracking; its hinges twisting as if an invisible force was pulling it, sucking it away from the frame. The girl opened an eye as the door gave way with sickening crack. The wood fell away, leaving a gaping, black hole. There was nothing on the other side - just an abyssal emptiness.  

"The door's gone." The boy commented, his eyes still fixed on the fire.

"Mm."

The girl closed her eyes again.

"Soon we'll be gone too." The boy continued.

The girl shrugged.

"Don't you care?" He looked up from the fire to glare at her, his tone piercing.

She kept her eyes closed, but slowly replied,

"There's nothing we can do about it. We're part of this world now...part of this house, this role. The game is over, and so are we. Until next time."

"You always say that." The boy frowned and went back to staring at the fire.

The girl said nothing. They were at an impasse. They'd had this conversation a hundred times, a thousand times. He wasn't happy, wasn't satisfied with how things were.

It wasn't like she was satisfied either. But she'd given up caring. It was too hard, too tiring. Not when you were stuck in an artificial world, with artificial rules, and an artificial series of events playing out over and over and over again.

It was hard to care when nothing felt real anymore.

She looked at him. His fire-lit figure contrasted the darkness above him where the ceiling used to be. He had floppy brown locks and a straight, angled nose, and a stubble of a beard that never grew to be anything more than a stubble. This was the appearance he had chosen, an artificial encapsulation of who he was. And it scared her, because sometimes she couldn't remember what he had looked like before.

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She closed her eyes, and after a while, she asked,

"I was wondering, do you ever feel....do you ever feel like we were ever real?"

He glanced at her, hearing the lostness in her voice. He opened his mouth to say something, closed it, then finally said,

"We were real, Liz. We were real enough to dream and flail and make stupid mistakes. Sometimes I wonder whether it had been a good idea to give it all up. Now that I look back at the life that we had - it was crazy and beautiful."

Liz just watched as the walls began to fall away. He continued.

"But I know was worth it. It was worth giving up my own life. But I just...I can't stand the thought that you gave up your future to be with me, to be stuck in this place where we're just doing the same thing over and over and over again. With no hope, no future, no dreams."

It all came rushing out, his frustrations that had been kept under the layers and layers in his heart. He went on.

"I'm sorry, Liz. I'm sorry I took it all away from you."

She looked up, to see the fire in his eyes dimmed with guilt and regret. And care, for her. She felt her numb heart give a little twinge; a good sort of ache. The sort she had not felt in a long time. Her mouth tugged a wistful little smile, and even as the floor gave way, she said,

"When I close my eyes to dream, you're the only one I see, Mark."

He stared at her for a moment, ignoring the final pieces of their world disintegrating around them. And then answered with a little complicated smile of his own as his figure began to disintegrate.

The fire went out.

The abyssal darkness disassembled the last two chunks of data, and then there was nothing.

Until next time.