There used to be stars, overhead. Stars so bright you could lay on your back in the grass, and count them, and see vast shapes and beautiful patterns splashed across the sky like diamonds on the ocean.

Or so I'm told.

But here, above, there's only endless neon, stretching high above us in ribbons and flashing, whirling lights - just a half-dozen stories down, a puffer-fish made of a thousand tiny pinpricks of light floats lazily, the text scrolling around its rotund form dissolving smoothly, only to reform in another language a second on. Below that, a glossy seven-story hologram, a naked woman with a radiant smile, the silvery lettering swirling round her breasts proclaiming Vividen - Turn your worries off and live. Above that, another advertisement, and above that, another, and another, until the blurry glow of the billion souls of the city smears across the sky, a forever twilight.

You're doing it again.

The thought makes me stir against you, a lazy drag of scars and steel against your skin, the soft hum of my arm purring to life as I lever myself up to gaze down at you. I can still feel it - down below, the warm, slow drip of my cum, the marks where my hands found your hips, before, almost raw to the touch.

Somewhere, on the bedside, there's a glass of water that I need.

"You're adorable when you're all fucked out, y'know that?"

You always did make me grin, after all. In the quiet moments like this, in the short, hot forevers before, when your eyes blaze and your body sings under my hands, when the electricity I feel inside me at having you is the only power I need to live. In the space between heartbeats, in flashes - tattoos shifting and simmering with fire, the ragged, hasty rip of another shirt from me, of every stitch from you, as we collide. And the moments, stolen from the world, when we're simply us, the scant day where origami animals dot the windowsills, and I tell you stories about childhood dreams as something slowly heats on what passes for a stove these days.

Even if there are the times when your face twists with hate, for a moment, at the suit I wear, or the instinct that flares when I know what you've spent the night doing, with the visor and the paint and the friends I've probably seen before, flat against the pavement.

But now, you've just got that sleepy, beautiful smile, and it's all I can do not to kiss you and spark the fire again. I'd rather have you like this, like that, even, a fist thrust toward the sky at the machine that sustains us, than how you are, most days.

The stare, the shake of your head, when you come back from the distant stacks of Vividen, a hazy dream of processing and rote, of stolen hours sold for just enough to eat - it's not you, even if you insist that all you can remember is just being you, shining bright, a blaze against the dark. We've argued about that, too - my past, your present, the long days when you slip into the gray, just another cog in a machine you rage against. Selling a bit of you, day by day, even as you spit I sold all of myself, far worse.

It's the moments like this that I love, that I treasure, of being, for just a breath, just you, just me.

"Off to fight the world?" I tease, softly, my breath tickling your ear.

One finger extends, slowly, up from your side of the bed, and I can't help but feel something bloom inside me, as VIVIDEN swims past, in a glare of teal and sound, projected on the top of some megalith outside.

Nights like this, almost, I wish I'd never started the company.

DPP Profile