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The orange glow of a nonexistent sunset clashed with the garish green felt of Dave's suit. From where he sat, on the edge of the roof of his apartment, he could see the faint outline of the bubble, like a great meniscus hovering over downtown Houston.
You could see it too, and you didn't know what it meant to him, but you knew he'd been staring at it blankly for several hours now. Long enough for that sun to have set quite a while ago, if it had been a real celestial body they were orbiting and not a figment of Dave's mind. Some people liked the progression of time in their dreambubbles, for day to fade to evening and night, but Dave seemed to prefer a more static existence. It certainly was picturesque, but something about a sun that didn't set bothered you.
Ultimately, this kind of stasis wasn't healthy. Everything needed to come to an end eventually. Dave didn't want the sun to set because he couldn't see the foregone conclusion that it would rise again.
"You should let it go," you said, sitting down next to him and crossing your legs under yourself.
He flinched a little, like he hadn't noticed you approaching, and one of his hands moved reflexively to his jacket lapel. He ran his finger along the felt for a moment before letting the hand drop back into his lap. You couldn't see his eyes, but you didn't need to. "Is that some kind of riddle?"
"No, but if you want me to be more cryptic that's definitely a thing I can do. If it would help you get to the point already."
He frowned and looked at you sideways, quirking his mouth in such a way that suggested someone had replaced his grubsauce with musclebeast shit. Or maybe he just didn't trust you, despite how much time the three of you had spent quietly coexisting in this place. How much time? Time was funny out here. Even for time players like the two of you, it didn't track perfectly. "If there's something you want to know, you're better off trying the direct approach. I'd say I don't have time to give the grim reaper chick the cognitive runaround, dodging all the pitfalls of my subconscious like I'm on some kind of Indiana Jones shit. You know, the conversational equivalent of running from the ancient booby traps set by some long ago colonized civilization with the preternatural ability to predict that a lame-ass anthropologist is going to come along hundreds or thousands of years later and try to steal all their sacred shit in the name of Science, as some kind of dumbass metaphor for the demons I'm dodging in real life. I'd say that, but let's be honest-- I have plenty of time. I just don't feel like it."
You didn't understand that cultural analogy at all, but something about it stuck in your protein chute. Your wings fluttered, twitching with irritation, but now wasn't the time to try to unravel that spiel to figure out why it bothered you. You had a job to do, after all. "You're stuck," you explained after a moment. "You're wasting your afterlife moping instead of making the best of it. You're not mo--"
"If you tell me I'm not 'moving on', I swear to fucking god," Dave started, but it broke with a laugh.
"Well if you'd stop being so fixated on whatever dumb thing it is you aren't telling me about, I wouldn't have to!" You laugh too, thinking about how time had felt motionless when you were dead. Everything had felt empty. Hollow. Pointless. To say it had been depressing was underselling it. It had been completely void of emotion and purpose. Well-- maybe not completely void of purpose.
"It doesn't even matter. It's not like I'm ever going to see her again anyway."
"Wow, stop being so existential. You're dead, not gone." Okay, maybe you were being a little bit hypocritical. "Are you angry at her?" You had been angry too, but it was a dull, passionless anger. There had been no joy in your revenge. No schadenfreude. Only resolution.
"Not at her," he said bluntly. "Look, I get what you're trying to do. The whole shepherd leading home the wayward sheep thing, which is kind of ironic now that I say it out loud because," his eyes flicked up to your horns, "Well, it doesn't matter because I don't know that it would translate, but. It's a human thing. The thing that's bothering me, I mean."
"Does it involve your human lusus? I hope you aren't waiting for him, because unlike you he's both dead and gone."
This time he pulled a face that looked like you'd punched him in the abdomen instead of just pointing out a simple fact. Humans could be so sensitive to the naked truth! "No," he said after swallowing a few times, but it felt like a lie. "Not really, anyway. I think if I actually saw him I'd tear ass to the next nightmare bubble. Pluck off your wings and flap myself out, that's what I'd probably have to do. Apologies in advance, sister. Hope they regenerate."
You wanted to prompt him to keep talking, but you were quickly learning that doing so would just cause him to dodge the question by going off on a nonsensical tangent about some human thing that would make little, if any, sense to you. Instead, you looked out at the sun and let your feet dangle off the roof, swinging them forward and back a little, your slippers glowing in the dying sunlight. Wait-- was it dying properly, now? You weren't sure, but maybe just a little bit. He needed to keep talking. This was good. "Why this place?"
Dave didn't answer right away, and for some amount of time-- short but ultimately indeterminable-- the both of you just stared into the void that was masked by the fake sun's luminance. You might not even know it was there if not for the faint glimmers of purple or dark blue, like an oil slick, of which you could catch brief glimpses between the shades of gold if you stared intently enough.
"I got my own ass fed to me for dinner up here more than once," he said after a while. "The whole omnipresent Big Bro thing was wicked disconcerting for the most part, but the dude was good at what he does. Did. What he did. Unfortunately for me, most of what he did involved being a raging fucking creeper."
What Dave was describing sounded not unlike the cavern trials, although that always happened before being adopted by a lusus. Humans sure are weird. "I bet all this stuff you're saying is super relevant," you commented in a manner that you thought came off as a polite observation.
Okay, maybe not. You could see the edges of his squinted eyes behind his shades. "He probably would have been able to do it. That's all."
"Kill himself, you mean?" You're just trying to be helpful.
"Sacrifice himself. Actually, I don't even have to say he would have-- that's kind of what he did. No, it's exactly what he fucking did."
"Hmm." You grabbed a lock of your hair and began stroking it thoughtfully. Hmm. "Sacrificing yourself in battle is very different from killing a time clone of yourself while it's sleeping, especially if there's no obvious or guaranteed reward, from your perspective, for doing so." You thought that much was obvious, but maybe humans really did need to be walked straight to the point. "The choice was never really yours to make, though. Inevitably, you still died. One way or another, time players have to be prepared to die a--"
"Right. A thousand deaths and all that. Man, that's some real existential shit you're on, Megido, anybody ever tell you that?"
"Funny. I thought I'd left that behind." You didn't even try to hide the smile.
"Sounds like you need to move on dot org. Doctor's orders." Dave chuckled humorlessly, like he'd made a joke instead of an insight. "Oh my god, I just remembered something. I wonder if Obama ever fixed the economy. Suddenly I care a lot about the economy and I have no idea why. I guess you don't come out on the other side of committing so much intense stock wizardry in order to woo an alien girl without it leaving a lasting fiscal impression on you. Dividends. APR. Valuation and cash flow. Listen to me use my words, oh man. Here's another word for you: diminishing returns. That's what you can expect when you invest in my ballsiness." His hand came back up to his collar, absently fingering the bloodstains on the lapel, which hadn't been there a second ago.
You reached out and grabbed his hand, which seemed to startle him, but he didn't pull away. "Dave. You need to let it go." His hand squeezed yours lightly, and you brought it to your lap, holding it there as the two of you watched in silence as the sun finally dipped below the horizon.