She stares into the mirror, and looks at what it
brings.
She sees herself in Sickbay, dying. It flickers.
She sees
herself in a ship being attacked by Romulan warbirds.
Her head hurts, and
her throat is parched.
She looks around, and sees the gray, gray
sky.
There is nothing here but mirror, and rocks.
She suddenly
feels the oddest need for sleep.
Before she succumbs completely, a voice
speaks.
Tasha Yar will not remember it in the morning, if there are
mornings here in this strange place:
"I am the Guardian of
Forever..."
--
The outfit has got to go. There's a cowboy theme at
the club tonight, and while the boots and fishnets might look good on her, the
tank top dress with the frou frou jangly things and the watchamacallits
zig-zagging down her back do not.
Krista has taken her car for a drive;
she wants lunch, she said, and has set out to find some good
Mandarin.
Pink thinks Krista just wanted to go for a drive. And why
not?
The fires have been put out. All of California is glowing from the
rain.
Miracle Rain, which never happens in October.
The air is
clearing, the smog is dampened, and, probably, Krista feels like she is being
buried in the aftermath of publicity after officially being announced as Pink's
new ....whatever. Maybe wrestling in chocolate syrup in her latest video hadn't
been the best idea.
An extra had used a cellphone to take pictures of the
couple after a scene. There were pictures all over the internet.
Pink
does not shy easily.
As the Terminatrix, Kristanna Loken had made a name
for herself. With Arnie winning the Governor's bid, it's not like she could keep
much of a low profile.
Being a B-list actress, however, and being a
fairly well off pop tart, are not quite the same things as being a Lesbo!B-list
nudie!Terminatrix and being a Lesbo!Popstar second only to Britney and
Christina, sharing the third tier with Mandy, and Jessica, and Willa (and, oh
Jesus, Michelle/Vanessa- because weren't they the same person? and Hilary Duff
now?) and Beyonce and her sisters and all the rest...
yeah, being
nudie!Lesbos not-in-love was special.
People love you when you're
famous.
Pink turns toward the mirror one more time.
A purple light
flickers- there is no other word for it, _through_ the mirror. And
then...
She leans over, touches her fingers, then palm-- she *swears* she
could see a greenviolet spark, so she reaches over, and
then...
--
The other girl hasn't moved.
Woman. She's a
woman, wearing a black jumper that merges into a kind of mustardy long-sleeved
top.
Pink rubs her hands across her shoulders.
A wind is rising,
which is just bizarre, in this place.
There doesn't seem to be much of
anything.
It is gray, and dark. With a weak, weak light.
She can't
find a sun anywhere on the horizon, although it seems as though every few
minutes a sort of muck gray cloudlike swirl parts a bit for a flash that could
be a lightning strike, or a shade of one.
There is a low half-rumble
which makes her uneasy. She can't place the noise.
It's been hours since
she's been here.
She is hungry for the Chinese that her not!serious
girlfriend must have had to eat by herself by now.
She's wearing the
ugliest-ass outfit that gets uglier with each passing minute she wishes she had
anything else one besides it. The boots are curiously comfortable for the hard
ground; she'd been pacing, then stopped.
She hasn't approached the woman
lying unconscious on her back because at first glance she'd thought the woman
might've been passed out on drugs or dead. A stirring moan and a hissing
exhalation of breathe -does that mean pain?-- in the first fifteen minutes of
her- what? Break? Trip? Crack hallucination? - in this place has confirmed
life.
Good. Pink doesn't want to have to touch her, because she knows
that Something Is Very Wrong.
After thirty minutes of finding nothing,
she had wanted to shout out: "All right, you *fuckers* you got me, and I swear,
Ashton Kutcher if this is you _again_ you just might live through it, but I'm
definitely gonna make you regret it-" but. That had been a while
ago.
There is nothing else besides rocks and the rocky ground and a round
thing which may have been a mirror but is gray, like the terrain and the sky and
the fuck-all-else, just gray, gray, everything is, drab and dark which includes
this not!mirror and it's *gray* like putty and it feels like it's freshly dried
clay and she's *not* scared, she *isn't*-
She knows there isn't anyone
else here but her and this...strange, unconscious, moaning
woman.
Suddenly Pink thinks that maybe the woman *is* dying. Maybe it's
an overdose. And that maybe, somebody, quickly, must try and wake her up or else
she'll really fucking die.
The woman moans again.
It is the
second in hours.
It's the only other human sound Pink's heard since the
same. She kneels hurriedly by the woman and grabs her wrists. They are
warm.
She grabs the woman by the shoulders and shakes her, "Hey! Hey!
Look, sweetie, wake *up*.."
Her efforts are rewarded with eyes fluttering
open, and then the woman starts taking big, gasping breaths of air-- so
violently it sounds like dry heaving, and she's looking at her- the woman is
looking at Pink-- and Pink exhales a little hurried breathe of her own, because
the woman is *alive* and she's concious, and that makes two of them aware that
they are *stuck* here in this hard, freakish gray place, and she
smiles.
"Who are you?"
She looks at the woman with a disbelieving
expression. That was *her* line.
End
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