Star crossed double cross

She was dancing as if underwater. Her sheer mutli-layered skirt bloomed out and whipped back and forth with each thrust of her hips, shook and vibrated like colored liquid as she belly danced, flew up off her ass as she got down on her heels and bounced. Her hair, waist length and deep gold, flowed around her and water dappled light moved in lines across her skin, like lightning that had been caught and sedated.

The guy she was dancing with was as green as they come. Smiling at her like no one would ever find out about any of this when he woke up, wearing a tuxedo top and boxer shorts. How did they allow this? Where was the god damned Principality for this shit? Shouldn’t all newborns have to get funneled into some kind of orientation? He thought about going over and yelling at them, maybe telling the guy to try and wake up right now, something, but before he could do anything, she looked at him.

Her eyes were black this time, reminding him, with the rest of her get-up, of some celebrity he couldn’t put a name to. But they were still Rory. He tried to place the woman in front of him over his image of the bouncing girl that had found him on the rooftop and the dark, solemn creature she had been the last time they spoke, and find the overlap, or the fusion, like glass disks laid on top of each other revealing another color.

Then she was gone. Like an idiot, he got up and flew toward the last place he had seen her. Nothing. He stopped and scanned around. He knew it was useless. One of the many subtle enchantments of the Allclub was that you could somewhat control who saw you. As he scanned the crowd of almost faceless silhouettes, he realized she could be any of them.

But he tried anyway, for a while. Long enough for his anger to get up over his longing and look down on it. Then he summoned a door out, but another one got in its way.

It was all white Lowes paint and bronze colored knob, like every door in his new built house growing up. There were faded and peeling sea flower stickers on it, and a do not disturb sign hanging off the knob was flipped around to say “Come on in!”

It felt like her in a way none of the other hers had. Before he could think of anything else he was already through it.

It was a teen girl’s bedroom circa 2004. His heart jumped, thinking he might have finally found his way into her realm, until the faux sun of the Allworld rolled by outside, and a handful of crafts flew over it.

She was sitting on the bed, one arm crossed over her stomach, cradling her tits on her forearm, the other folded away from her, wrist thrown back, holding a cigarette. Her thin skirt was rolled up on her waist and her crossed legs threw her hips out at either side of her like smooth half-moons. He tried to think of something to say, and discarded the first things that came to mind, not wanting to give her the fucking satisfaction.

“So, this is what your happy place looks like?”

She smiled at him, even chuckled, as if they were old friends.

“He’s big into aughts nostalgia. It’s retarded. He was born in fucking ninety-nine.”

Luke was immediately confused, and his face showed it. She was confiding in him, sharing a moment, like they were both in on the game.

“What?” She blinked at him.

“Nothing. Just wondering how you can insult your food like that.” His words came out acid, though he had tried to color them like a joke.

She glared at him.

“Are you fucking serious with this judgmental bullshit right now? You shoot guys like him in the fucking head all day. At least with me they get to cum.”

Despite himself, he flinched, the jealousy squeezing whatever stood in for his heart in this place like a slipknot. She sensed it, and joined in.

“Why don’t you be honest. Why are you here? What do you want from me?”

His mind went in two directions. On the one hand, a part of it was reacting explosively to her insinuation that the guys he killed were anything like the wet behind the ears wide eyed poor bastards she got in her web, and after the initial revulsion and dismissal of that possibility, he came to the sickening realization that for all he knew, they could be the exact same mother fuckers.

But the rest of his mind was consumed with her; memories, a burning longing, and trying to snare an answer to her question. Why had he come here? Why go through that door?

He had to admit, finally, to himself, that it hadn’t felt like a choice. But he had no intention of admitting that to her.

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“Guess I just wanted to see if you at least got anything out of ruining my life. But it looks like you’re about where—"

“Ruin your life? I couldn’t ruin your life if I tried. No one can, not in this place. Don’t you get it yet? This place is fucking empty. It’s nothing.”

“You sure go through a lot of leg work just to steal a piece of nothing.”

He felt a moment of pride at his wit, in refreshing contrast to the massive embarrassment over his childish groan about her ruining his life, but she just laughed, shaking her head and looking up to the textured ceiling.

“Steal! Oh my god grow up. What did I take from you? Your memories? You still remember them don’t you? It’s not like some bullshit doctors office dream machine can make you forget. Or, what, you want mem, is that it? What would you even buy?”

“More Bliss, probably,” he snarled at her, getting close. She just kept laughing, though her smile swelled with pity.

“Is that so bad? You really think it’s like some hard drug, just cause they sell it in those cheesy Disney world opium dens? They do that on purpose! You’re not addicted, you’re just bored!”

It was a hot kind of anger, the kind with embarrassment and inadequacy in the face of a former lover as fuel, and he reached out and grabbed her despite himself.

He shook her, and she just kept smiling.

“You. Can’t. Hurt. Me. Here. This place isn’t real, isn’t touchable. Nothing can hurt you. Don’t you fucking get it?”

“No, I don’t get that, bitch! I’ve felt bullets in my lungs! I’ve seen heaven dangled in front of me! I loved you and watched you fly away and whore out with a smile on your stupid fucking face! This place does fucking hurt! And if you were really so God damn above it, you wouldn’t be trying so hard to leave it!”

He had been told, in one of his frantic searches for her, that what she really wanted, what she was saving all that money for, was a ticket to so-called Paradise. Though up there Luke was sure it had actually been Dr. O who had told him that, the extractor left it open-ended.

He hadn’t believed it, not completely, until that moment, when he saw the hurt on her face as she realized he knew.

“You know about that, and you still hate me? God damn dude, wouldn’t you do everything to get there. Fuck yes you would! You already shoot anyone they tell you to just for a chance to run at that light again! You think it's gonna wake you up don’t you!”

“I fucking hope so!”

“So do I! So does everyone here! That’s all anyone wants! A fucking fantasy land and we’d all kill each other to get back to something real!”

I wouldn’t kill you, Luke thought, but only said,

“Then why doesn’t everyone buy a ticket? Why isn’t paradise full and this place empty? You think you’re the richest bitch in here?”

“Because they still have hope. They still think there’s something under some rock or through some fucking door that’s gonna make them happy. Or they found a way to have power over someone. That’s really it. In the other place, in the real heaven, no one has power over anyone.”

“If it’s the real heaven, why do you have to pay to get in? Isn’t that—”

“It’s a symbol of your sacrifice! To have enough money to buy anything here, and throw it away! You gotta prove that you give up this place completely! That you know it’s not real!”

He just stared at her, and it was better than anything he could have said. She heard her own words bounce back at her, and hated them. They didn’t have the power or the sense they held in her head, and she couldn’t bring herself to believe them.

She groaned and growled and clenched her fists and sat down hard on the bed. When she looked back up at him she had tears in her eyes.

“Ok, so now you’ve proved to yourself that I’m just as miserable as you! Now go back to your phony-ass hitman game and gloat!”

Looking at her scowl, her anger burning eyes, a question Luke had held in his heart since she left him broke out like an air bubble rising to the surface. It breached his lips before he realized what was happening, and after he had said it, he knew it was what had driven him through her door.

“How did you smile at me like that, that first day? And the rest of them. How did you seem so happy?”

It was his turn to get all teary-eyed, and it softened her a bit. She sighed and spoke to the carpet, half smiling.

“Same way I always do. I thought about the best day of my life, and how if I keep moving forward, if I make it through those gates, I get to live it all over again. That’s what keeps me going.”

For the first time, Luke thought about her other life, her real life, which he could never be a part of no matter how high he climbed up those fucking boards, and felt his chest caving in. He thought about every smile she had ever given him, and wondered what she had really been smiling at. He wanted to ask her more than he wanted anything. He wanted to know what she loved or who she loved and what about it all he didn’t have. He wanted to wake up, for real, and find her next to him, and the vision of that moment bloomed in his mind like a second Sun and he couldn’t even breathe.

“You think I’m a piece of shit, don’t you?” she said, softly, wetly, still to the floor.

He opened his mouth to say, no, but, really, he had to admit he did, but he admitted it only through silence. He could give her that much.

He wanted to tell her that he was a piece of shit too, that her awfulness was only a welcome outline to the swelling form of her goodness, of everything he loved about her, but when he reached out for what her goodness was, he found only memories of a smile not meant for him.

Looking back, down there Luke knew, through his own painful extraction, that he had known she was faking it the whole time, but convinced himself it was the world that felt false, out of longing to stay with her just a bit longer, in the hope that he would one day wake up out of the dream into a world where the truth was reversed, and she really was smiling for him.

He had accepted the Otherworld for what it was almost instantly, because he truly didn’t care. It was just another world, just another screen covering something deeper that he could never understand. He had fallen in love with what he had hoped was beneath her façade, or with what he had imagined might lie there. He had loved, he realized, only his own mind. A phantasm, with about as much relation to the sad girl in front of him as his dreams had to the real world.

He left her there, staring at the ground, and went out the door. Just before he shut it behind him, the desire became too much, and he looked back, hoping to see her looking up at him with longing.

But the door was gone, and his hand held nothing but air.

A few moments later, he was back in the Bliss den.