They were suffering together, sitting on the sofa in front of the gas fireplace in their room. Dan was better at hiding it, but Freya had grown expert at reading him.

There was the slightest shadow on his smile when she was slow to reach a conclusion he was moving towards, the helpless twinge where he struggled for a way to say something, and Freya was not there to fill in the gaps for him. When their eyes met, there was a camaraderie of dissatisfaction. They twisted in the same frustrated need.

Freya and Dan were addicted to each other, and this was withdrawal.

Everything felt like too much effort. They drifted through dinner, barely tasting the food. During the meal, their conversation died a slow death before either of them could say what they wanted to. Freya glanced around the hotel room, the ghosts of their passion still twisting in the sheets, dripping on the bathroom floor, but those people were gone now.

Dan kept glancing over at Freya. It had been her idea to spend another night, which meant it was her responsibility to fix this somehow. But everything felt frayed and slightly unreal. She had become a wraith, powerless to touch the physical realm. She tightened her grip on the arm of the couch, half-expecting her fingers to simply pass through it.

That’s crazy, Freya recognized, but everything about this was insane. Praying some magic ball would let her hear her boyfriend’s thoughts. Pretending she was in love when they were just empty words someone else had said. Hiding away in Vermont and acting like she never had to go home.

She wondered if they should forget about staying the night and just drive back. The hotel would charge her, but it didn’t matter. She reached into her pocket for the Starball, and Dan’s eyes followed her hand. But it was cool to the touch, expending no effort. What if it was out of power? What if it had died?

The other dies, too. Freya remembered.

“Ask it to fix us,” Dan said, half-joke and half-desperation.

Freya pulled the Starball out of her pocket and held it out in her palm, and he set his hand over hers.

“Positive thoughts,” she said, and they willed Unity to start. But the engine would not turn, and she returned the orb to her pocket after a few moments, feeling dumb for trying it.

“Worth a shot.” Dan shrugged, and she started to laugh without him. They were both so stupid.

Earlier that day, Dan had held his head up like he meant to save the world singlehandedly. Now, the face that peered at her seemed more boy than man, unsure and miserable. She saw a flicker of anger in his eyes and wished he would go through with it. Freya wanted Dan to hit her as hard as he could.

As she chased the errant thought, Freya was suddenly laid out in the dirt behind the Grayson cafeteria again. She remembered the brilliant flash of light behind her eye, the throbbing in her skull, the cold smell of rain falling all around her.

With a sudden terrible clarity, she realized she’d wanted that, too. She’d been an insufferable cunt to everyone until someone finally snapped because she wanted to be hurt. Wanted someone to destroy her because she couldn’t do it herself. Someone wrenched her off the ground to drag her to the principal’s office, and rain pouring down her face grown warm. The vision broke apart, and she was weeping on the couch. Dan had his arms wrapped tightly around her.

“I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” she kept sobbing into his shoulder, but it wasn’t enough. When her voice had trailed away to nothing, she felt him moving. He pulled out his phone.

“What are you doing?”

“This is getting heavy. I’d like to call Dr. Garbuglio. Is that okay?”

“Don’t,” Freya said, and her voice was too sharp. Dan drew back from her. Was he threatening to call her psychiatrist because she wouldn’t fuck him? She shut her eyes and shook her head, not at him but at herself for thinking that. It was such an awful, unworthy thing to think, and she would have to answer for it when Unity returned.

If it ever did.

“I’m sorry, Dan. I’m just broken. You deserve better.”

“Hey,” he said quietly. He took her by the shoulders and caught her eyes while she tried to look away.

“Everything is okay. You’re not broken. You’re recovering. Believe me, you’re a lot stronger than I was.”

“I’m not,” Freya began, but Dan shook his head slightly, stopping her protest. Dan had never lied to her. He wouldn’t say it if he didn’t mean it.

She tried so hard to believe him when he reached out and set his palm at the center of her chest, over her heart, and her breath caught. He took her hand and put it at the same place on his chest. His heart beat through his shirt.

“Deep breaths,” he said, and she followed along with him. He held each so long she felt dizzy, but it was working. She stared into his eyes, and her thoughts stilled.

“Freya, I know you. I love you. I am you,” Dan said, and the words hung between them for a long time. She didn’t want to disturb the sound of them.

“Even if it doesn’t come back?” Freya finally asked. From the way he took it, she was sure he had the same fear.

“Yes,” he said. She shut her eyes and nodded. She needed to believe that. Freya moved towards Dan and kissed him, the lightest touch she could. He kissed her back just as delicately, no pressure. He drifted back from her, slowly enough she didn’t feel like he pulled away. For a while, there was no sound in the room but the fireplace hissing.

“We can just try to sleep, we don’t have to do anything else,” Dan offered. At once, all the weight on her was gone. Freya hadn’t realized how worried and obligated she’d felt until he said it.

“You’re so good,” she whispered in his ear, feeling him smiling against her cheek.

* * *

Freya dreamed of the river, and Dan dreamed of the sea, night after night. The dreams had recurred so often they’d become intrinsic. However far they drifted, the dreamers knew they would return to their secret place, the familiar scene where every aspect rippled with déjà vu. It was as inevitable as Saṃsāra. Tonight was different.

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Freya stood with her back to the river, listening the water warbling across the stones. The black whispers of the river surrounded her, and the sky was aflame with stars. A million rumbling, crackling furnaces, singing in a vast stellar sonance. Meteors streaked past, zinging like popped strings as they burned into nothingness.

Shooting stars.

It was time. Her heels hung off the edge of the stone, and she crossed her arms over her breasts, prepared for the fall. Always, she would let go and the river would close over her with the roar of an audience. Somewhere in the depths, she heard Randall’s voice, and she would tumble and thrash as she looked for it and wake up, straining her ears in the darkness. But there was something in the way. Dan stood behind her, bracing her with his shoulders.

Elated, Freya wheeled around, and she was dazzled by unexpected light. The sand beneath her feet was golden wheat, the water was a perilous green-black, and the storm clouds wheeling around them were a deep, bruised black swirled with indigo. It took a moment to realize this was his ocean, his dream. Dan dreamed in color.

Freya stood on his beach, eyes drawn out to sea. He swam for the shore with all his strength. With every stroke, the current carried him farther out.

Freya tried to call out for Dan, but she had no voice. There was a gap in the rumbling overhead, as if the thunder had skipped a beat. Dan was so startled he slipped beneath the waves. Freya felt everything shifting, movement beyond the veil threatened to break the dream. She stilled her mind, willing it to hold together as Dan was tossed in swells as tall as buildings.

They were aware of each other now, and she felt Dan weighted with despair, he could not reach her. Night after night, he never made it to the shore. She stepped towards the surf, ready to swim out and join him, but he projected alarm. The sea would drown them both.

This is a dream, Freya beamed, trying to get through his rising panic. Let go.

It was hard for Dan to release himself from the compulsion to enact the dream he’d done this so many times. Slowly, he began to relax and, as he did, his sea no longer moved him. Freya’s river rose around him, the current carrying him to the shore. In his eyes, Freya saw herself, radiant as a lighthouse. Dan climbed onto the shore and embraced her just as a torrent of black water raced across the sand and ran over their feet.

I found you! they thought together. Their joy was pure. They were just a single perfect note, ringing between two bodies in the estuary of souls. Neither dared move nor think, wanting to prolong the magic forever. But it was impossible to remain still in a dream. The great wheel turned, and the shadows were hungry for equilibrium.

Even as they tried to hold on, they drifted apart. The storm overhead gained strength, massive thunderheads circling around the hole at the top of the dream. They were within the eye, but there was no calm. Being within a dream magnified the difficulty of Unity.

The rifts in their perception that had seemed so significant when they were awake were vast chasms here, and there was no anchor, nothing objective they could use to reconcile. They could not even agree on what they were.

In Freya’s colorless dreams, her body was ill-defined and mutable. She was an apparition that could blow apart in the wind or wash away in the rain. But Dan’s idea of her was exact and persistent, and she found herself being cast into form by the strength of his conviction. She recoiled from it.

That can’t be me!

The Freya Dan created was too glorious, too beautiful, too complete. It was someone she could never be yet, even as she tried to deny it, she could not escape what he’d made her.

This is you, Dan radiated, and she was in pandemonium, terrified of how much control she’d lost, resentful she had to be this person he’d devised. He was seeing himself through her, and she was awash with guilt. She had no sharp lines or rich colors for him.

She saw Dan as motion, thrusts of strength, sharp jabs of intellect, lapping waves of gentle serenity. It was only when she felt him regarding himself with amazement she understood what she’d done.

Am I made of music?

She’d built Dan from the way he made her feel, and this was the purest language for it. She’d felt so inferior, but now she was seeing that, beneath those sawtooth waves glinting with razor lines of white, there was nothing beneath them. Dan’s ocean was only a skin over silence, the river ran deeper and darker.

The swirling currents of her river were washing away his beach, threatening to drag them under. Where they combined there was tumult, freshwater met salt. Afraid, Freya tried to restrain herself. The pang of her alarm resonated in Dan, amplifying into fear.

We shouldn’t be here!

It was the same strong aversion he’d felt when they were parked in front of the church. Now, she saw the roots of it. Base urges, coiled things that ran deeper than thought, pieces of self that were meant to be expressed only here, and then swiftly forgotten. Things Dan never wanted to show anyone.

Dan tried to shove the tangle of thought down, but her interest was stronger, wrenching it out of him. They were serpents in the mantle, molten titans that could rise and swallow them both. At once, she was thrilled, electrified by his vision.

Freya felt his throbbing lust, Rigo pulsing in his hand, the quicksilver jolt of cum touching his skin. Memories of jacking off in the shower thinking about her while his finger slipped up his ass, burning up with shame afterward.

Jagged spirals of self-destruction, the urge to just slam down on the gas pedal and annihilate himself in a clench of shearing metal and snapping bone. There were deep pits of unworthiness, pools of seething rage on the verge of erupting. All the things the hollow ocean concealed were laid bare. This was the real Dan.

Utterly exposed, Dan tried to turn away, but she was all around him. Freya felt him trying to disappear, his edges coming apart with a soft fluttering of dark wings. She was inside of him, a cold and ringing intrusion. It was impossible to be so close without being pierced. She’d gone so deep, and she was afraid it was too far, but there was no turning back.

That’s not me!

Dan surrounded himself in a wall of useless denial. She’d seen everything he reviled, everything he wanted to hide from himself.

I want that, Freya thrummed, and she was alight with it, on fire with arousal. She felt movement beyond the dream, warmth spreading at the edges of the sky and sensation quivering beneath the earth.

Freya could move towards that, she could break the dream, but there was a note dancing at the back of her mind, a whispering voice she wanted and feared. She remembered the cool surface of the Starball. There might never be another chance. She trembled at the edge of action. It was as hard as jumping in the river.

Shedding all artifice as if she were pulling a dress over her head, Freya disrobed completely. The gaping wound of her grief, the inflamed edge of her resentment at Lassa, the sneering supercilious suspicion she was smarter than most, belied by the ringing inferiority she felt around her friends. Her despair was unfolding petal after petal, a Mandelbrot rose with no end. She was the pit at the top of the dream, the singularity that sucked in everything and gave back nothing.

I am not Freyja. I am Shiva. I will destroy you.

Her thoughts stilled the sea, the clouds broke apart, and everything was silent. She had emptied herself. Now, they knew. When Dan did not reply, she spiraled inward in self-abandon. He would leave her, and he would be right to.

For all the hidden fire burning within him, she was the real monster. Freya turned from Dan as he had turned from her. The dream was gone, it was all over. She was in the hotel room with the shadows from the fireplace dancing against the wall.

But when she sobbed, she heard it through his ears.

“Freya,” Dan’s voice was soft, she felt his lips against her ear. His arms were around her, and he pulled her closer when he ought to be throwing on clothes and headed for the door.

“I want you,” he whispered, his words shining in the certainty of Unity. He’d seen the very core of her. He hadn’t turned away. She felt his desire. He wanted to be drawn into her oblivion as much as she wanted to smolder in his fire.

They had been chosen.