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INT. - DAVE’S APARTMENT. NIGHT.
CAMERA A - A darkened high-rise room overlooking a downtown that never seems to know when to call it quits. A clock on the wall RADIATES the time in violant crimson, draping the walls and furniture alike in the stark glow of 10:35.
10:36. There is no sound of clocks ticking, nor or gears sounding through the space. The soft, almost MELODIC hum of quiet electric is the only ambiance to be found.
FOOTSTEPS. The sound of a door handle being tried.
MAN’S VOICE (MUFFLED)
Fuck.
The tell-tale jingle of keys on a ring. Fumbling with the lock. Vindication and the turn of a key: the sounds of a door being OPENED, a room EXPOSED.
MAN’S VOICE
-ere we go. Told you I had the right place.
WOMAN’S VOICE
Given you were the one who drove me here, I would rather hope so.
MAN’S VOICE
Well. What’s a little breaking-and-entering between friends?
We are greeted with TWO SILHOUETTES framed against the now-open door. One -- the man, we may assume -- clutches a bottle by the neck and steps inside, groping CLUMSILY for the light-switch. This is DAVE STRIDER: you know, the director? He’s supposedly a big deal, as far as erroneously rich Hollywood-type celebripeople go. True to form, his shades have not budged an INCH from their mounting place on his nose, even as his necktie is loose around his neck, suit jacket missing, shirt untucked and stained with something looking of BLOOD or something like it.
WOMAN’S VOICE
As far as first dates go, I’ve had worse.
DAVE
I literally shudder at the thought of what could possibly be a worse date than the night I’ve treated you to so far.
The lightswitch flipped to bathe the two in HARSH fluorescents courtesy of those twisty bulbs that never seem to die, DAVE steps out of frame, towards a kitchen, leaving us with Her.
It has to be Her, doesn’t it. To refer to Her in any other case feels disingenuous, dishonest, and distasteful in that order. We cut to medium-close and watch eyes like SILKEN WINE wash over the room, observing, onymous, overwhelming. She is ROSE LALONDE, and anything more said about her is LACKING, mincing words to fill dead air better spent in the contemplation and observation of Her.
CAMERA B - Reversal shot, from view of the door. We watch the two enter, the door CLOSING with a firm clack behind. We see now where DAVE’S missing suit jacket is: placed around ROSE’S shoulders like so much elegantry -- a CAPE, if they were in fashion.
ROSE
You’d be surprised.
DAVE
Christ, Lalonde, You can’t just say a thing like that and not elaborate.
ROSE
Can’t I?
DAVE
Uh. No?
DAVE, who for his part is at least attempting to play the part of gracious host in stead of the STAR-STRUCK one, gestures at a seat, offering it her way. The BOTTLE he had brought in with him -- a rich, long-necked thing that must have cost a ridiculous amount of money even if you were just a real fan of grapes -- is set down and left to gather condensation on a coffee table as he takes the seat opposite. Between them rests a sturdy looking typewriter and a small stack of loose paper.
ROSE
Whyever not?
DAVE
Because. You’re telling me that this isn’t even your easiest worst night out yet. That someone, somewhere, somehow treated you to a shittier night out than the one we just had. Tonight had to have bombed pretty hard, I’d say.
ROSE
Not by a mile. I was actually beginning to enjoy myself.
DAVE
See, that’s what I mean. You can’t just say a thing like that and not elaborate.
ROSE
It’s worked perfectly well for me this far, hasn’t it?
DAVE
Usually one would take the hitmen into consideration and say no, no it hasn’t.
ROSE
Well. If that’s where elaboration gets me than perhaps I ought to start paying more attention to my publicist after all.
CAMERA A - We cut to a not-quite-head-on view of the proceedings. DAVE, American shot, sits on the left half of the frame on the shittier of two sofas, three-quarters to the camera. ROSE, in medium, occupies the right half at one-quarter, REFLECTION clear in DAVE’s mirrored shades.
DAVE
Well, think of it this way: at least my computer didn’t explode halfway through the Skype interview. I think your publicist can consider that a resounding success, given your track record.
ROSE
Quentin really loves telling that story, doesn’t he.
DAVE
It’s all he ever fucking talks about, Rose. Was his pitch really that bad?
ROSE offers a coy shrug in response, sinking into the cushions of the couch. Slipping DAVE’S jacket off her shoulders, she sets it in her lap, sitting comfortably in the cherry-red armchair. Dave, meanwhile, produces two wine glasses and sets about uncorking that bottle.
ROSE
Worse. Really he was asking for his laptop to get blown up. He should count himself lucky he wasn’t on the phone at the time.
DAVE
So, that’s a yes towards your publicist considering this evening a resounding success, then.
ROSE
Well. Business. That remains to be seen. I still haven’t made up my mind about you, you know.
DAVE
Oh? And here I thought I’d made quite the fitting first impression.
ROSE
It was certainly an introduction, I’ll grant you that.
DAVE
It’s what I’m famous for. Besides, didn’t you just say a few minutes ago you were having a grand old time?
ROSE
Don’t upsell yourself just yet, Strider. I said I’d been starting to enjoy myself. I enjoyed myself interviewing Spielberg and piecing together how long he’d spent reading the Wikipedia synopsis of my books.
DAVE
Mh. Did the date with Spielberg end in hitmen, too, or were you saving those for someone special?
ROSE
Oh, don’t be such a prude. Steven is married, and even if he wasn’t jealousy is hardly becoming, you know.
DAVE
Hey, I don’t go and get myself shot at for just anybody. I have standards, Lalonde.
ROSE
Is that what you call them? I’d’ve used a different word.
DAVE
Cute. Tell me, do you always talk this big a game or is this just your business face?
CAMERA C - Medium close on ROSE. She holds DAVE with a glittering eye, lips curling to a wry smirk. She reaches out of frame and accepts the glass of pale purple wine, holding it in mock toast.
ROSE
I imagine you’ll find out soon enough.
CAMERA A - Reverse shot, medium close on DAVE. He has leaned forward, as though caught in the magnetic pull of ROSE. Through the dark glass of his shades we can just make out the outline of his EYES: fixed, staring, HUNGRY. His mouth breaks into a similar wry smirk, mirroring ROSE, and he raises his own glass as well.
DAVE
I suppose I will.
Rose stops. Brow furrowed, she flips back through neatly stapled pages, rereading, searching. Whatever she’s looking for, she doesn’t find. Across the room, a silhouette stands in the balcony doorway, framed in a halo of neon and smoke. Beyond him lies an L.A. landscape robed in the soft silks of twilight, where the shadows of buildings, of mountains, and of things yet to come all hang long over the city’s dusky sprawl.
“Is that it?” she asks, looking down at blocky lines of typewriter text. “Is there more?”
Dave takes a long drag of his cigarette before answering, exhaling smoke in the slow breath of a cloud. “That’s it,” he confirms, not turning to meet her gaze. “For that one, anyway.”
She doesn’t say “so there is more,” even though she wants to. Instead she wields silence not unlike a scalpel, waiting until Dave has finished a final drag and stubbed out the cigarette in an ashtray and retreated back inside. He looks at her, and she sees her reflection in the mirror coat of his shades.
“I wrote that two years ago,” he says plainly.
They had met for the first time on the first of the month. She remembers it, exactly as he has written it, remembers the way the wine tasted on her lips, the easy conversation that had flowed along with it. It would be hard to forget that night.
Rose remembers a time long ago, waking from nightmares to scratch and scribble inky death onto paper. Scarlet flagships, broken aviators. She doesn’t envy him the script. “Is that the only vision you’ve had?”
Dave’s lip twitches at ‘vision’ -- he would argue the phrase in favor of ‘bad trip’ -- but he shakes his head anyway. “No,” he says simply, and while normally that would be all anyone could get from him and that would be all there is to say on the matter the look Rose is giving him now cracks a normally solid foundation. “Sometimes,” he says, taking the seat opposite Rose, running a hand along the typewriter laid out on the table, “I’ll have these dreams. Vivid dreams, more lucid than anything. Sometimes it’s nothing, hell most of the time it’s nothing. But sometimes…” he shrugs, as if that tells all.
It tells enough. “Sometimes it’s everything,” Rose finishes, and Dave nods.
“Yeah. Something like that.”
“Do you always give them the film treatment?”
He shrugs. “Only the important ones. Like that one you’re holding there.”
Rose blinks. He had become distressingly accomplished at catching her off guard in the sparse few weeks since they’d met. It was infuriating and she would die before she said aloud how much she enjoyed it. She laughs, softly. “So there are others,” she says, leaving the question unasked.
Dave nods. “Yeah. There are. I have the more vivid ones on file. If they didn’t come direct-to-video from an overactive part of my cerebellum -- or, fuckin’, even worse, the future -- I’d say they’re actually pretty decent from the standard I hold treatments to. Which now that I say that out loud probably sounds whack as all hell coming from the guy that forced Sweet Bro and Hella fuckin’ Jeff into the world, but. I think they’re good. Maybe sometime I’ll even let you read them.”
Rose scoffs. “Show me yours and I’ll show you mine, Strider.”
As expected, the self-professed hotshot Hollywood director doesn’t know exactly where to go with that one, missing on the return swing and leaving the score once more neatly in her favor. As it ought to be. After a minute’s silence or so, she can tell he’s collected his thoughts and is ready to try again. “You, too?”
“You mean about the-”
“About the dreams. Visions. Whatever,” he clarifies, leaning forward in the sofa. “You’ve seen things, too. A guy shows you a script he wrote two years ago of a night that wouldn’t happen for eighteen months and this isn’t a big thing for you.”
“I’ve seen many things, Dave,” she intones, calling back to the night they’d met. He’d called her message prophecy, and she’d wondered, and she’d seen. This was just another piece, falling into place. “It seems you have as well.”
A breath is taken and misplaced. “Seems that way,” Dave says, and it is subtle but she can see him begin to withdraw into himself. Were she able to see past the shadow-lenses of his shades she is sure she would see fire in those eyes, fire and all manner of things, all manner of hells. She wonders what moment he pictures, what moments he thinks about late at night when the world is but a soft mattress, a cool fan, and the inevitability of time.
She wonders, but will not admit it, nor will she dare to ask, if as a child he too once wrote about a golden trident, splintered wands, and a sundered blade.
Then, suddenly, and with all the fanfare that had announced the moment, the moment in turn turns back upon itself and is gone, and Dave breaks back into a familiar mask. “...anyway,” he says. “We were working on something.”
“Were we?” Rose hardly remembers, and realizes with a blink that she is still clutching the sparse pages of screenplay in her hands, holding it almost to her chest.
“Well,” he concedes. “We were going to, but we got distracted. Though,” he glances her way, gaze impermeable, “maybe we ought to have foreseen that, huh. Guess freakshow prophet future sight can’t always be 20/20.”
Rose scoffs. She does a lot of that. “Don’t call it that. That’s not how the sight works, either. You don’t see… dates, or what your day is going to be like, or whether or not traffic will be bad, or… things like that. Not vividly, anyway. You only see the things most pertinent.”
“You sure? Because it kind of sounds like-”
“I’ve been a seer since I was thirteen years old. I’m pretty sure I know how it works, Dave.”
Dave shrugs. “Maybe you just think you know how it works and you’ve overlooked something. Freakshow prophet hindsight can’t always be 20/20 either, y’know.”
The only response Rose has to that is a sigh. She has met precious few that share her gift of foresight, and precious fewer in person. Fate was a twisted, tangled skein, whose machinations veiled even the keenest of sights. Cleverer minds than hers had been lost in its labyrinth. It was not a thing taken lightly, and here he was, doing just that.
To his credit, Dave abandons that train when she sees her reaction. As anyone in show business will tell you, one of the greatest skills you can possess is knowing precisely when to jump ship and cut ties from whatever dumbfuck thing you’ve just said or done. Happened to him a thousand times, and it’ll happen a thousand more. He eyes the typewriter laid out on the table, running a hand over the cold mechanical keys. He looks at the script still resting in Rose’s lap and thinks of the desk drawer a room over filled with the rest of these treatments. Yeah, there were more. For the longest of times he’d thought them to be nothing more than dreams: vivid, yes, awesome and terrifying and heart-wrenching, but dreams he could put to paper anyway. It seems, again, that he was wrong.
“...can I ask you something?”
Rose blinks her eyes back open, focusing in on her reflection in his glasses. This is a tone she hasn’t heard from him yet. “That depends,” she says, after a pause. “If you’re about to ask me if having the sight is like Gloria Foster’s character from The Matrix, I’d really rather you didn’t.”
Dave smirks. “Y’know, I’d had you pegged for someone who likes The Matrix. If our little partnership arrangement falls through you should get Lana and Lily to direct Complacency. They’d do good with it.”
A smile touches her lips, at that. “They’re hard to get a hold of, these days.”
“I can get you in touch.”
“Well, then, I suppose our business is concluded. Thank you very much, Mr. Strider, I’ll take my leave now.” Neither of them make any effort or attempt to move from their seats, though Dave’s lip does crack into a bemused curl, which Rose will take as victory enough. She watches him like he is a puzzle to which she knows there is an answer but cannot yet begin to understand. He watches her like she is a painting he knows he never will. “What were you going to ask me?”
Dave hesitates. He’s not in the habit of doing that. “...actually, nevermind. I was going to ask, well. Ah, it’s not important.” He shifts, uncomfortably in the leather seat. He wishes he hadn’t put out that cigarette: some nicotine sounded pretty good right about now. He really needed to stop smoking when he got anxious. Also to stop smoking in general, but. Neither here nor there.
“Well now I’m curious,” Rose says, tilting her head. “C’mon, no take backs. I assure you that whatever it was probably isn’t as bad as you think it is. Unless it is actually just, just super shitty, but I’m giving you the benefit of the doubt, here.”
“No, really, it’s-”
“Dave,” she says, and her voice adopts the same tone that his had when he’d first thought to ask. “You can ask me. It’s alright.”
Dave’s lip quirks, and he drums his fingers on the armrest. God. Fuck it, okay. “What was your first vision like? Do you remember it?”
Oh. Oh. “Of all the things I thought you might ask me, that hardly even registered as one of them.” Now it’s her turn to hesitate. How much does she tell him? He must have seen it, too, he must have. “I… yes. Yes, I remember it. You never forget your first, right?”
“Ha.” There’s not a lot of humor in that laugh, even for Dave. “Suppose you don’t. Sorry, is it. Weird to ask what visions are like? You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to, I just figured, y’know…” he trails off, looking away.
“That we could compare notes?” Rose finishes, and Dave shrugs. “One freakshow prophet to another?”
That startles a laugh out of him, and Rose decides suddenly that she will break a personal rule she has held for nearly two decades. Seeing the future, it turned out, wasn’t nearly as comforting as people would think it to be, and so she’d kept a secret oath to only herself that she would never tell anyone directly what she could see. She could prod and poke at the whims of fate with crochet hooks and knitting needles, but she would never give prophecy. Not in that sense, anyway. Those fragmented shards of time were hers to bear, and she would not burden them upon another.
But Dave was different. In. A lot of ways. “But, uh, no, no, it’s not. Weird. No weirder than asking about any other prophetic portents of things to come that I’ve seen.”
This time Dave’s chuckle has found some humor seeped into it, radiating out through a flash of his teeth. “Right. What’s a little precognition between friends?”
Rose smiles, then exhales a breath. “Precisely. Anyway. Are you sure you want to hear this?”
Dave pauses. “...hang on.” He stands, making a fast track to the kitchen. There is a wine rack mounted to the wall and he grabs one seemingly at random, fiddling through drawers to find a corkscrew before returning and setting two empty glasses down for the both of them. Rose watches, with some amount of bemusement, as he works corkscrew until the satisfying thunk! and pours as though this is a totally normal circumstance. “Anyway sorry to interrupt you were saying.”
The bottle looks like an expensive vintage, and Rose would know if it were. Good for portents. Rose smiles, then frowns. “I was thirteen when I had my first vision. It woke me up in the middle of the night. I think I always knew that it wasn’t just a nightmare, wasn’t just a dream. It was more important than that. I’d never had a dream so vivid, so… real. I think even back then I knew that it would be. Real, that is.”
Dave sits back with his glass, listening, rapt. “Yeah?”
Rose nods. “Yeah. Later on I’d learn that they’re all like that.”
“All your visions?”
Another nod. “It’s called the sight, but it isn’t just seeing. Not always, anyway. Sure, there are minor visions, inclinations, like stumbling across an old memory you’d forgotten only it happens next Thursday instead of many years ago, but. The big ones, the important ones. It’s like you’re there.”
“And… your first?”
Rose sighs, face darkening even so many years removed from the memory. She knows now that she is not as many years removed from its coming to pass. The signs have begun to show themselves. It hangs over present and future both. A part of her -- most of her, if she is honest with herself (all of her, if she is more so) -- hopes that Dave will take it well. “‘The first vision a seer receives is invariably the vision of her own demise,’” she quotes. “‘It is a thing fragmented and devoid of all context.’
“For me, it was death at the hands of the Condesce.”
Dave has sat back in his chair. “Oh.”
Rose nods, again. “I would call it a pyrrhic victory. I know she is wounded, perhaps even badly, but. That was my first vision. We fight. The sky cracks and the earth splinters. Blood spills.”
“Until at last,” Dave quotes, “you throw down your enemy and smote her ruin upon the mountainside?”
The laugh that escapes her is soft and genuine. “Nothing so prosaic, I imagine. Does that answer your question, Dave?”
Dave goes back to wishing he hadn’t stubbed out that cigarette. “Is that what happened that night at the restaurant?” he asks, thoughtfully eyeing the glass in his hand. “After I answered your question about prophecy.”
“Mhm. Our meeting brought them on. Minor visions, three or so. No more than a snippet of conversation each. If you’d like I’ll let you know when they happen.”
“I was present?”
Rose smiles. “My dear Mr. Strider, surely you must know by now you play a leading role.” Is it a trick of the light or do his cheeks color slightly, at that? She cannot quite tell. She decides she will break another rule -- she decides she will break every rule, for him. “I don’t just mean in my visions, either.”
He laughs, with little humor. “Flatterer. I’m far too binary for Calmasis, and my people are already talking with Sigourney Weaver’s people about Zazzerpan. Besides, I’m the one behind the camera, remember? Director cameos have been overplayed since Hitchcock.” He knows that this isn’t what she means, not by a long shot, but the alternative is something he has not yet finished grappling with, late at night, when the demons of false memory play in his brain. Dreams of a him who is not himself, of sweat and blood and iron, of the breaking of the world. He dreams of his deaths, or of deaths that would have, perhaps should have been his, but are not. When he wakes, he sometimes checks his skin for scars that are not there. “I’m just the ideas guy, sweetheart. You want star power, talk to our agent.”
Suffice it to say being the star of this show in particularity -- this bloody, cosmic show that was apparently to be their lives -- was a concept roughly as appealing as taking a swan dive from the penthouse onto concrete, as roughly as tenable as winding back the clock, and roughly as helpful as a second cigarette on a sleepless night.
“No, I don’t think I will. I’m talking to you ,” Rose insists, snapping him out from that influx of thought.
He hums. “So you are.” Whether or not that has been a mistake on her part, he thinks, remains entirely to be seen.
She eyes him, and he’d crack a joke about asking if she can read his thoughts or something when he remembers that she has already literally demonstrated her ability to do magic so there’s a definite maybe in there and he under no circumstances wants to turn down that particular avenue and allow the possibility of that to be a thing that happens, so he doesn’t. Instead he broods over the glass of wine he’s poured himself and the two of them slip into a silence that stretches on for a minute, then two, then five. For her part Rose at least allows the silence to be a comfortable one, and not the oppressive cloud of dark futures past and twisted omens that it could be. The wine helps with that, as it always does. There is much worse company than the man you are fated to die with.
(They will die together, or not at all.)
“Well,” she begins, after the silence has reached out for long enough and their wine glasses have been finished, refilled, and finished again. “I do believe it’s your turn, now,” she says, and Dave cocks an eyebrow. “We had an arrangement?” she reminds with a coy smile, glancing down at the neat lines of typewriter text protected by a clear film. “I’ll show you mine, you show me yours, Dave, do keep up.”
“Oh, that. ” Dave looks as though he’s attempting to look nonplussed. “I mean. Yeah, alright.” He sets down the glass of wine. He stands. He hesitates. He has done more hesitating, more second-guessing, in the past three weeks than he has the past four years. It’s infuriating. He feels like a kid, all over again, and that’s infuriating, too. “Yeah. Yeah, they’re. Come with me,” he says, and before he can say anything further he turns sharply on his heel.
Rose follows after a half-moment, pausing to let her vision clear after standing so abruptly. Dave’s penthouse is absurdly large, far too much so for a single man to live in alone, but that was Hollywood excess for you. (Rose couldn’t say much on that front, either, with her own secluded mansion far upstate in New York, but that was Times bestselling author excess for you.) Leading her past the kitchen, a media room that was bigger than her first apartment, not one, but two bedrooms she suspected weren’t even the largest in the suite, Dave finally arrives before a study, perfectly out of place within the rest of the penthouse. “Do my best work in here,” he says, with the vaguely embarrassed half-shrug of someone showing off a place or thing that obviously means a lot to them.
“Oh my,” Rose says, taking in the notably more bookshelves than she expected, the movie posters set in dark frames, the old vinyl records that line the walls. “Am I standing in the room where Sweet Bro and Hella Jeff, Semicolon, the Mauve, was written? Should I take my shoes off? Is this sacred ground?”
“Semicolon was your favorite? Really?” More than anything he seems a bit surprised she’s seen enough of his work to have a favorite, and shoots her a shaded look as he crosses to a small safe almost out of place with the rest of the study. “Wait, lemme guess, it was the Queen Latifah cameo. That’s everyone’s favorite part of Semicolon.”
“Yeah that was pretty fucking great,” she says, keeping a respectful distance as he cracks open the safe, trying not to look too intrigued when he pulls out an unmarked binder and starts flipping through it. “Inspired.”
“Yeah, yeah, I’m a visionary,” he replies, selecting a few short clips of paper, spreading them out across the desk. “Case in point with these, I guess, right?”
Rose laughs with little humor, poring over the scripts. They begin starkly, more often than not, thrown into a fight, a conversation, a movie premiere, a scene en media res. She nods more to herself than to him, and picks one at random. Dave quirks his lips at her selection.
“What?” She asks, glancing down at the fine, neatly printed black text.
INT. - DAVE’S STUDY. DAY.
CAMERA A - We observe from the doorway, looking into a small, private study. Shelves line the walls, vinyl records and movie posters lining the spaces betwixt. A lone typewriter rests atop an otherwise unoccupied desk. Behind the desk, a FILM TREATMENT in hand, stands ROSE LALONDE. She takes the center of the shot, the most important place, the FOCUS of all attention. As is her right. To her left leans DAVE STRIDER against the back wall, going, PERHAPS, for casual.
DAVE
Yeah, yeah, I’m a visionary. Case in point with these, I guess, right?
CAMERA B - Cut to perspective shot of Rose’s hand, poring over the scripts. We see their opening actions: brief, fast, often VIOLENT. Her hands pause at one, a decision made. We hear DAVE laugh.
ROSE
What?
CAMERA A - Soft zoom in as Rose reads the script in her hands. She FROWNS. Her eyes skip downward - Hello, dear - then flit back upward, BLINKING rapidly. The pieces begin to fall into place.
ROSE
Oh.
DAVE
Proper mind-fuck, that one, isn’t it.
ROSE
You could say that. Oh, Jesus.
DAVE
Yeah, it’s- yeah.
CAMERA B - We watch the script, seeing it for what it truly is: a script of this conversation ENTIRE, read but merely a few lines behind.
DAVE
Freakshow prophet future vision, am I right?
ROSE
Ha. Yeah, something like that. God, you even note the actions.
DAVE
Just the most important bits. I take it this isn’t something you’ve seen? This whole... interaction.
ROSE
No, no. As I said, the sight is... fickle. I do not see everything. There are gaps, in the visions. Wait.
CAMERA C - American shot of DAVE, ROSE’s expression rigid in the reflection of his SHADES.
ROSE
Have you been reading off a script this whole time? This entire conversation, is it--
DAVE (INTERRUPTING)
Pre-meditated?
ROSE stares. DAVE offers only a SHRUG - freakshow prophet future vision, right?
DAVE
Not in the sense that you’re thinking. I haven’t Primer ’d this shit. No earpiece or anything. Haven’t memorized it, either. I just know the highlight reel.
ROSE
The highlight reel?
DAVE
The scripts. The treatments, I mean. I knew I show them to you -- knew I showed them? Know I showed them? Man, fuck tenses, this is bullshit; I had a dream, a while ago, about showing you the scripts. Well, not, like, you, you, I didn’t know I’d be showing them to Rose Lalonde, at least not at first. I knew there’d come a point when I show them to someone who understands. Who sees things too. And that’s. You. Obviously. Well It wasn’t obvious until we actually met but you fucking know what I’m talking about here, right.
CAMERA A - We watch, with breath bated, ROSE. This is the default mode for watching ROSE, but, like. You get it. Her lips PURSE, eyes scanning the treatment as it is acted out in real time, glancing down at what HAS just happened, skipping forward to what WILL happen, or, perhaps, what COULD happen, and sees-
No need to act so surprised.
You told me something, earlier. You will tell me something, I mean. Er. God, shit. Fuck , tenses are bullshit. You will have told me something, before I let you read this. I don’t know what it is, exactly, but I get the feeling it’s something heavy.
The world’s ending, isn’t it?
You don’t have to answer that question. I think we both know the answer. I’ve read it in your books. The Predicant Scholar, the stars winking out, the breaking of the Complacency, dying gods. All of it. Like I said: prophecy.
I’m sure we will have a lovely conversation about all this, so I probably don’t need to go over old material. I do want to tell you something, though, something birthed from countless sleepless nights spent thinking about the future, such as it is, such as it will be; from countless fading and half-remembered dreams that maybe aren’t dreams but memories; memories that sometimes aren’t mine yet sometimes are. Maybe I’m overstepping -- I don’t know how long we’ve known each other when you read this but I feel like I’ve always known you. I’ve felt that way since I met you. (I look forward to that meeting, by the way.) -- but.
You’ve read Eliot, right?
We are not the Hollow Men.
Maybe we die. Maybe we die and it means nothing. I really fuckin’ hope not, but never let me be called an optimist. I’ve dreamt a lot of death, Rose, and maybe we die but if that’s the way the world ends I really, really don’t want it to be with a whimper. I don’t think you do, either.
No matter what fate holds in store for us, I want you to know something, Rose. I want you to know that you aren’t the only one. You aren’t the only one fighting this fight. You aren’t the only one who has to bear the burden of the future. I do, too. I’m with you.
You are not alone.
[BEAT]
CAMERA B - “YOU ARE NOT ALONE.” We focus on that word for a long time. SILENCE fills the room as ROSE reads, and rereads. We go to CAMERA A and see her, IMPASSIVE. She is all but carved from marble.
ROSE
Oh.
DAVE
Oh?
CAMERA A swings, rotating- no, orbiting around ROSE, who turns to face DAVE. She looks at him with new eyes, and her expression, as she crosses towards him, is SOFTER than he has ever seen it.
ROSE
How long ago did you write this?
CAMERA C - American shot. DAVE. Through his SHADES we see the barest hint of the shape of his eyes breaking through the barrier of tinted glass that nothing, NO ONE, has ever breached before. The ghost of visible lines suggest a HARDNESS to his eyes, but for ROSE, of course, they are anything but.
DAVE
The night before we met.
ROSE (SOFTLY)
‘You are not alone...’
CAMERA A - ROSE. Her face, silent, speaks of the long years she has suffered bearing the trials, tribulations of Atlas; the weight of armageddon piled high upon her shoulders. She is BEAUTIFUL, a goddess in mourning. Carved on the lines in her face are centuries, eons, PAST and FUTURE, the world entire.
ROSE
You’d know all about that, wouldn’t you.
It is not a question.
DAVE
What gave me away?
ROSE lifts a brow, the ghost of a small, sarcastic SMILE spiriting on her lips. Without breaking eye contact she GESTURES: the study, the penthouse itself, Hollywood. ‘Take your pick’, she seems to say.
ROSE
You’ve been just as alone as I have.
DAVE
In the biz we call it ‘mysterious’.
ROSE
Or secretly gay.
DAVE
Yeah that too, but like who actually reads National Enquirer? Besides everyone knows they’re in with Crocker.
She LAUGHS, and DAVE smirks, enraptured.
ROSE
It must have been hard.
DAVE
Oh, I’ve had worse people say worse things than-
ROSE
I’m not talking about National Enquirer, Dave.
DAVE
Oh. Right.
ROSE
I know what it’s like, Dave. To be alone. To think that it is you against the world. To not be able to tell anyone what you know, what you’ve seen. To be fighting a war against the future, to be losing. To feel hopeless. You’ve felt that, too, haven’t you.
DAVE
...yeah.
ROSE steps closer, taking DAVE’s hand in her own. DAVE starts at the contact, looking first down than up to meet her EYES, such as he can. There is a DETERMINATION in her gaze as she seeks him out behind the WALL of tinted glass. I hope she will be happy with what she discovers there.
ROSE
You aren’t alone, either, Dave. Not anymore.
The KISS is feather-light at first, tentative and terribly uncertain. DAVE’s breath, which always PRETENDS at calmness, at composure, CATCHES in his lungs. He has not dared to hope at this, not DARED to more than wonder, to remember on dark nights how her lips tasted in DREAMS. It feels like memory, now, like something oft-practiced, the ease at which his hand CRADLES the back of her head, at which he kisses BACK.
It is as though he kisses the sun, DAVE thinks, searing when they break. It is not a deep kiss, almost chaste in its brevity, but its end finds both BREATHLESS all the same. They BLINK, remembering themselves: ROSE with DAVE's shirt balled loosely in a fist against his chest, DAVE with his hand at the small of her back to angle her closer.
For a moment, NOTHING moves.
DAVE
I...
ROSE (INTERRUPTING)
We...
They both pause. BEAT. DAVE snickers. ROSE snorts. As one, the two BURST into laughter, a sound that RESONATES through the study. It is a laughter marked with RELIEF, a relief stained bloody and raw. It is the relief of seeing a light in darkness, the relief of seeing a port in storm. It is the relief of a man who drowns in thought, the relief of a woman who drowns in memory. It is the relief of a shared understanding, the relief of the camaraderie of a shared struggle.
It is the relief of knowing one is not alone.
DAVE
Did you always know? That it would be me, I mean?
ROSE
Oh, no. The sight would never be so prosaic as to give me your name outright. I always wondered, though. Even before we’d met, officially.
DAVE
Yeah?
ROSE
Yeah.
DAVE
Me too.
They LEAN upon each other, caught in the gravity of each other’s gaze. The second kiss shares none of the first's RESERVATIONS, and after a moment's silence the two FALL upon each other like rain, or perhaps better like lightning: later, DAVE will think back to this moment and remember the ELECTRICITY that arcs between them, the flashes of light like STARBURSTS in her eyes. There are stars -- no, SUNS -- shining in the violet of her gaze, and for all he can DAVE will capture this moment and build to it a shrine in his memory.
ROSE CLINGS to his frame that she has claimed as both hers and as sanctuary, hands CARDING through his hair, looping around his neck as breath is found in GASPS and lost again. Lips find lips and it is like breathing for the first time, like the gasp of air of one nearly drowned.
The two breath the air of each other, and it is only then do they realize that they had nearly drowned without it. They cling as though the other is the flotsam of a sinking ship, gasp for the other is lighthouse in darkness. I dare not say what they do more; it is too precious, too private, to speak aloud or put to ink.
They are no longer alone.