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A moderately rough nudge woke Angela from her sleep. Her eyes snapped open, and she surveyed the room all around her. Her and Fareeha’s bedroom, that was. Pillars of blue moonlight poured in through the window, one beam cast a soft glow on a framed picture on the bedside table: a photo from Angela and Fareeha’s wedding day, complete with Fareeha’s mother Ana standing proudly beside herself, and her tall, normally jovial boyfriend Reinhardt crying into a tissue.
And then, Angela’s brain woke up enough to realize the source of the shove: her wife had fallen restless in her sleep, again. Must have been another bad dream. She had a lot of those.
“Fareeha?” Angela called to her, softly. “Fareeha, are you alright?”
Fareeha squirmed around for a few moments, before her eyes fluttered open, and she flopped onto her back, looking up at the ceiling. “Yeah, I just… I had the strangest dream just now.”
“What was it about?” Angela turned on her side to face Fareeha, a hand absently grasping her by the waist, stroking her side in a gentle pattern.
Fareeha frowned, trying to remember. “I was… back home. But it looked different… more futuristic. Like, there were flying cars and robot camels. And one of the Great Pyramids had this weird, high-tech energy cap on it. And I was wearing armor… like Iron Man, you know?. But it was blue. And I was flying around in the air. There was a battle.”
“Like a sci - fi movie,” Angela noted.
“Yeah, just like that. And I was in a squad with other...flying soldiers, and zipped around in the air and shot rockets everywhere. There was so much destruction and chaos, I’m surprised I could make sense of any of it.”
"Who were you fighting?”
“I don’t know, exactly. All I remember was that they wore black and red uniforms, and they kept parachuting in from dropships and firing up at us from the ground. They even used this bazaar as a war ground - it looked a lot like the Khan el-Khalili bazaar in Cairo. Hell, I think it was the Khan el-Khalili.”
“You haven’t been there in a while,” Angela mused.
“Yeah. And yet it was so detailed… I could see the clutter of trinkets for sale, see the people scuttering around to get out of the battle… and do you want to know what the strangest part was?”
“What?”
“You were there, too. You wore a white and yellow flight suit, you even had wings,” she chuckled, now, “you looked like an angel.”
“Wow,” Angela whispered, “is that how you secretly see me?” she teased.
“Well, of course. You are an angel. But I mean, you were literally flying on those wings, soaring through the air. It looked like you were helping out injured people - carrying them to safety.”
“Huh. Sounds like something I’d do,” Angela jested, and she reached up to gently grasp Fareeha’s cheek, now, stroking it with a thumb. She gazed upon her wife’s face for a brief moment, noting the slight unease in her features. “You said you were airborne, too. Did we… did we fly together?”
Fareeha said nothing for a moment.
“Fareeha?” Angela asked again, a bit softer this time.
“No,” Fareeha replied in a husky, cracked voice. “We didn’t. I don’t think you recognized me, at all. You did your thing, and I did mine, and then the battle was over.”
Angela smiled, and gently turned Fareeha’s face to look at her. “That doesn’t sound like something I’d do. If I saw a pretty, bad-ass soldier flying around in the air like that, I think I’d at least say hello.”
Fareeha smiled back, and turned on her side to fully face her wife. “Maybe it was supposed to take place in another life, where we’d never met. You know - how dreams can offer glimpses into other realities sometimes.”
“How dreadful it must be - for that version of us,” Angela whispered. “Sounds like a cosmic travesty.”
“I truly cannot relate,” Fareeha grinned, and she leaned in to press her lips against Angela’s in a soft kiss. Fareeha nestled against Angela and soon, the two dozed off to sleep again, basking in the comfort they found in each other’s arms.
Maybe there was an alternate universe where they had never met - but she certainly was glad to not be living in it.