Archive of Our Own

The Day it All Ends

“She’ll forget? I don’t want to reset.” Alex… or, Brandy, rather. Talking to no one, out of nowhere. Her eyes become full of panic, searching Clara’s face for some sort of answer, then suddenly looking right through her, the way she did back in the beginning. Like she wasn’t quite there, like she was an object in the background. Brandy steps back, detaches herself. It gives Clara that same feeling– like she’s invisible, like she isn’t real. 

“Forget what? Reset what?” She’s desperate for Brandy’s attention, for answers. It was easy for the confusion to take a backseat all these months, as it became a world for just the two of them, endless and beautiful and exciting. 

“No, you can’t. Kimmy, please.”

“Kimmy? Brandy, what’s–” Her voice becomes high pitched and panicked. Brandy isn’t looking at her. All these months, Brandy never mentioned a “Kimmy.” Never mentioned a “reset.” All these months– how much fear was Brandy holding in?

Then again, how much was she?

But she couldn’t just reset, could she? After all, she wasn’t frozen like the rest of the characters. She herself, she knew… things. Surely, she was more than the motionless Inspector Lavigne, the stone-still Mrs. Roban.

“Kimmy, I don’t want to reset, please–”

There’s a flash– whiteness, blankness, a sweep of nausea. Everything slips away. 

7 Days After The Simulation Froze

Clara wakes up in the same room she’s meant to be in with her husband, who is somewhere frozen on the front floor of the hotel. She isn’t sure whether or not to go find Alex– er, Brandy.

Something still seems off, still seems like they are supposed to be keeping their distance from one another.

And if she’s being quite frank with herself, she’s still angry with Brandy for treating her like she’s nothing, and isn’t sure what to make of everything she saw when she walked through into the Nothingness. She was Nothing; she was some sort of cartoon, or dream or– the technology of it all was too confusing to pinpoint, and it didn’t matter. This wasn’t real, but it was all there was.

This, and Brandy.

There’s a knock at the door– soft, unsure.

Clara opens it.

Brandy stands at the other side, wearing the same fitted suit as she has for all the other days they’ve both been stuck here, the only unfrozens in a sea of statues.

“Listen,” Brandy begins. “I know you want nothing to do with me. But I don’t know how long this is going to be like this, or when they’ll fix it. I was going to take one of the cars and drive to see how far out this goes. You don’t have to come with me, but I’d love it if you’d join me, since–”

“Fine.” 

Brandy’s eyes widen. “Really?”

“Yes. Well. I’m curious too, and it’s hard to completely shun you when you’re the only other living breathing human here.”

Brandy’s eyes melt, never leaving Clara’s face.

“The car’s out front.” She turns to leave. Clara stands in place, bubbles of anxiety rising through her.

“But– I don’t know if I trust you yet. I just… I’ll spend time with you. But just know I don’t know how I feel about you.”

“Totally valid with me. I get it.” Brandy nods, puts out her hand for Clara to take it, but Clara pulls back. Brandy’s odd ways of talking, her exuberance, the image of Brandy’s face in Clara’s mind insisting to her that she “ wasn’t real ” crash through her mind like lightning bolts.

Brandy shrugs, staring at their hands separated by at least two feet, both hovering for different reasons. She pulls her own hand away, leading Clara down to the car.

When they get in, Brandy settles into the driver’s seat. “Oh dang, I don’t think I know how to drive a stick shift.”

“What else would there be?” Clara asks.

“Uh– doesn’t matter. I think if this tech works I’ll just be able to do it because I’m Alex. Right? Right. We’ll find out, I guess.” Clara hops in and shuts the door, prepares herself.

Sure enough, the begin to drive. The road extends out into a long loop that allows them to pass everything they’d seen already– from when Alex Palmer accompanied her around town. 

“Now what if we go down here…” Brandy muses. She makes a turn at the end of the road and it reveals complete blankness.

Not the black voided darkness that Clara had seen, but simply an absence of… anything. No buildings, no road, no mailboxes or sidewalks or cars or frozen people. 

“So it’s a full street,” Brandy comments under her breath. “What happens if we–” she opens the door and hops out of the car, walking a few feet away. To Clara, she appears to be standing over nothing– like she should be freefalling down out of the sky. 

“They didn’t create this part! It’s just empty! This is crazy! ” Brandy begins to jump around, twirling and letting the flaps of her suit twirl around like the skirts of a dress. It’s silly and spontaneous and it makes Clara forget about all her misgivings.

She leaps out of the car, watches as her own feet fall onto the nothingness. She giggles, takes off her heels, tries to run in all directions.

And slams right into an invisible wall.

It bounces her off, the reaction of two North magnets coming close and instead of making contact, a soft pillowy sensation envelopes Clara and buoys her backwards, knocking into Brandy. Brandy catches her by the elbow, sending a thrill up Clara’s arms and stomach.

She turns around, attempts to pull away. 

Instead she puts her opposite hand over Brandy’s, still clutching at her elbow.

Takes a leap, takes this moment over the weird whiteness. She pulls herself up by her toes and kisses Brandy, who kisses her back. She feels Brandy’s other hand come up and hold onto her neck, and the thrill feels even further. 

So what if she’s confused. So what if they’re angry. There’s no way Brandy still thinks she isn’t real. 

Not when she can kiss her like this.

23 Days After The Simulation Froze

Clara wakes up, her body sensing that it’s morning. She isn’t quite sure how days and nights work here, with everyone downstairs being frozen and the sky being a grayish color that is indistinguishable by the hour. 

Whenever Clara wakes up, she has to take a few minutes to remind herself of her current situation. Sometimes when she’s still half asleep or out of it, her initial thoughts are to wonder where her husband is, or worries about that poor dog Bon-Bon. 

And then it all hits her again once her mind wanders to the doctor, Dr. Palmer. The one who is Brandy.

The one who is here with her, the only two people left in the world.

Following this reminder, she’ll get up, dress herself, and by then either Brandy will knock on her door, or she’ll go to find the room Brandy has set herself up in. 

This time, Brandy doesn’t come. So she goes and finds the room herself.

She knocks, lets herself in.

Brandy is on her bed, crying.

“Brandy? What’s the matter?” 

“I don’t know what’s going to happen. Sometimes it just gets me.” 

Clara hesitates– she goes back and forth between seeing Alex Palmer, seeing Brandy as the person who denied Clara’s humanness, and seeing Brandy as the woman stuck here with her, with thoughts and ideas and emotions that make Clara feel like her body is on fire. 

“Me too. Everything is so unfamiliar, even now.” She slowly inches forward, unsure of how to proceed.

“I just– I think I need a drink or something. Do you think we can do that here?”

“It’s morning!”

“Come on, Clara. What even is time here. It’s nothing. That sky doesn’t even change.” She motions out the window, where the light gray sky sits motionless, stuck in a moment along with all the other people and animals and objects. 

“For all we know it’s five o’clock. Which is perfect for me, actually. Let’s go down to the bar.”

“Do you know how to make a drink?”

“First off, my name is Brandy. I’m literally the human embodiment of a drink.” Clara giggles. “And second off, yes actually. While I was trying to make it as an actress in my early twenties I bartended in New York City. I was pretty good at it, too. Come on– I'll treat us both.”

Brandy’s entire body seems to lift up and brighten with this new idea, and as Clara follows her through the hotel to the lobby where the bar sits in the corner of the same room where they first met, an idea occurs to her.

Brandy truly had a whole entire life outside of this– the life that Brandy bluntly pointed out Clara doesn’t have. A childhood, a young adulthood. Memories that are as real as anything. And the happiest she’s seen Brandy yet was right now, when she was able to reminisce and think of those times before she was stuck here in “the gray,” as Brandy had referred to it. 

She wants to pull that out of Brandy more; and she wants to find it for herself.

Brandy whisks them to the bar, and insists Clara sit at one of the stools. “We may as well have some fun. Talk to me like I’m just some random bartender.”

Clara sputters. “Um… so… come here often?”

“No, silly! I’m supposed to say that!”

“Oh, right. Of course. Well then… hello there. What brought you to bartending?”

“Great question, milady.” As she talks, Brandy reaches down and starts to pull out bottles of alcohol, different cups and spoons and things to, presumably, make fancy beverages.

“I’ve travelled far and wide to seek the best people, to get all of their biggest secrets. And the easiest way to do that is to travel with nothing but the clothes on my back and spirits in my pocket.” She throws a bottle up in the air, catches it, and flashes a wide smile at Clara. 

She winks, and Clara melts.

“What about the real you, though?” 

“I thought we could play a game, instead of real life.” 

“I want to really know you though. I’d like to hear about the real world.”

Brandy thinks for a moment. “Maybe. Not yet, though. Let me disappear into this a little longer.”

So they do. Clara pretends to be the sultry patron of the hole-in-the-wall bar, taunting and enticing the bartender as if they were two strangers sharing one singular moment in time. It’s freeing in a way Clara didn’t expect it to be; she’s able to pull herself into a character that she creates second by second– and wonders if this sensation is what drew Dorothy to acting in the first place. She doesn’t have to be herself; she can be whoever she wants.

Brandy, in turn, becomes a smart, confident, charming bartender, shaking martinis and slicing lemons to brandish the sides. She pours them both drink after drink, making a big show of the fact that she would partake in the booze alongside her patron. “I’m not supposed to drink on the job, so don’t tell my boss,” she mused, winking again. 

“Your secret is safe,” Clara whispered back, putting a finger to her lips in faux confidentiality. She winks back, feeling that same forbidden thrill. 

Soon, the alcohol begins to make Clara feel silly and dizzy, and she pulls Brandy out from behind the booth to sit at the piano with her.

“I can’t actually play, remember?”

“No, but I can. Just come sit with me. I’m feeling woozy and I want you next to me to hold me upright.”

“That, I can do.” Brandy moves out from behind the bar, and Clara takes a chance– grabs Brandy’s hand, fusing them together with the sparks that she feels shooting out of her fingers at each point of contact. 

She pulls Brandy next to her and begins to once again play Clair de Lune. She wonders if she can play anything else; she searches her memory for something that isn’t this.

“I think I only know this one,” she comments.

“Still one more than me.”

“But I can… I can write my own, then.” She explores the piano keys, closing her eyes and listening to the sounds echoing out of it. She can sense Brandy next to her, and feels another shock when she feels Brandy put her arm by the bottom of Clara’s back. Clara wants to stop, pull Brandy in. Kiss her on the piano bench while dissonant sounds ring out.

“I love how old fashioned your songs sound,” Brandy muses bluntly. It takes Clara out of her fantasy immediately, back to the present moment. 

“Old-fashioned? I don’t recall you making us that one.”

“No, I just mean– never mind.”

Clara stops playing. “No, what is it?”

“I shouldn’t have said anything. I’m sorry.”

Clara slides herself out from the piano bench and crosses her arms. “No, tell me at once. Sometimes you do that. You make those little comments, and then I don’t know what you mean. Is it more about me being ‘not real?’”

Brandy closes her eyes, winces. “It was about how this… this movie that we’re in… it came out almost eighty years ago in my time. So there’s some… outdated things. That’s all I meant. It makes sense that the songs you’d come up with would match the era.”

“Because I’m not real, you mean. Because I’m like a pawn in this game. That’s it, isn’t it? You still see me as a part of this whole structure and not as a person.”

“No, I do. I do see you as your own person, it’s just–”

“It’s just that I’m not. I’m less than you forever because of it.”
“Clara, come on. We’re both stuck here just the same. And who even knows how long we’ll be here. I’m as clued in right now as you are!”

“What a pity for you then.”

Clara feels embarrassed, used. Like a doll on a shelf or like– like Pinocchio. She’s a real girl. Let Brandy, at least, see her as a real girl. 

She’s almost out of the door when she hears Brandy’s voice, desperate, dejected. “I was crying this morning because I was thinking about if I were to die here. And if nobody knows what happened to me.”

Clara turns. Brandy is still sitting at the piano bench, slouched over, her fancy suit vest suddenly seeming out of place and ostentatious.
“I’m on edge. Thinking about how they’ll explain my death, if we never get out of here. If something is going wrong. And I’m sorry, I just– I think I’m jealous that it won’t be that way for you.”

“If this all fails, then I disappear too. And to that effect, I am quite aware that Dorothy died a tragic death herself. Don’t behave as though I don’t have the same human thoughts and feelings that you do.”

“It isn’t the same.” 

Clara feels tears burning in the back of her eyes. Always, Brandy categorizes them at two opposite ends. The real, and the fake. The one who can die, and the one who will disappear anyway. 

She rushes out, thinking she’d go up to her bedroom but instead aiming for the sea, where the water sits like a still bath, accepting her into it like a hug. She takes off everything but her undergarments, wading in and closing her eyes. She isn’t sure how long she stays out there. She loves the way it doesn’t move at all; she wishes her own opinions of Brandy would stay as silent and still, instead of this confusing rollercoaster she’s forced to contend with day in and day out. 

When she returns inside, she sees a handwritten note sitting on the piano keys. Looking around to see if Brandy is watching from a corner, she scampers over to it.

Clara,

I’m sorry. I don’t know what to make of any of this, any more than you do. But I do know that I feel most like myself when I’m with you, and I feel more human and real than ever when I’m with you. And only another human can make someone feel that safe and understood. Please, forgive me. Maybe we can understand all of this together.

-Brandy

Clara holds the letter in her hands. Reads it, rereads it, reads it a third time.

She runs up the stairs to Brandy’s room and bursts it open.

The second she’s flung herself inside, she finds Brandy sitting, wide-eyed. Brandy stands up, looking at her expectantly. Waiting to see Clara’s reaction to the letter.

Instead of responding with words, Clara begins to walk towards her; delicate, hesitant. Stepping closer and closer, closing the wide gap between them. Brandy steps forward on her own, beginning to reach for Clara.

Their hands find each other, pull in like magnets waiting for release. Brandy puts her hand onto Clara’s neck, and the tingle that shoots through her is just enough to propel Clara forward to Brandy’s lips. Her hand moves to Brandy’s hair, feeling her way from the top of the pony tail down to the end, then pull her in from the small of her back. Brandy’s long fingernails lightly trace Clara’s neck, shoulders, face, the side of her arms as they entwine and the kiss becomes deeper. Every part of her is on fire.

They’re both real. They’re both here. There’s no questioning it now.

48 Days After The Simulation Froze

Clara wakes up to the sound of the piano keys playing in the lobby. She rises herself out of bed, feeling her hair tangled up like candy floss from sleeping in every which way. She listens intently to the noise, and letting out a small fluttering laugh when she recognizes the sounds of “Old McDonald” and other nursery rhymes that Brandy appears to be attempting to figure out on the only instrument she has accessible to her.

Instead of dressing in the same clothes that she’s always in, Clara dons a robe and brushes her hair out before descending into the lobby.

“I’m trying to learn. I figure I may as well get some skills out of this, Groundhog Day style.”

“Groundhog?”

“Um– never mind.”

“Is that a song from your time?”

“No, it’s actually this whole movie time loop situation thing. He relives the same day over and over and gets a girl to fall in love with him.”

“Sounds familiar.”

“I’m a few steps ahead of him, actually, I think.” Brandy turns, her nose nudging Clara’s face into a long, soft kiss. She takes her hand and pulls her in closer, begins to take her hand to Clara’s robe, snaking her hand inside to Clara’s thigh. A rush shivers through Clara, putting both of her hands onto Brandy’s shoulders. Brandy breathes in deeply, her face against Clara. “Sit with me. Come here.” Clara is barely in control of her body, the way she melts into Brandy. Hungrily, she allows her own hands to begin to explore Brandy. She hears herself groan, clutching at Brandy’s back, Brandy’s hips, while Brandy lets her mouth nestle into Clara’s neck. 

Their bodies continue to fit together, trail over one another, leading to an unspoken, thrilling ecstasy between the two of them. 

By the time it’s over, they both find themselves on the floor by the piano, sticky strings of hair across their foreheads and down by their ears, breathing heavily, and unable to break away from each other’s eyes. 

“You’re so beautiful,” Brandy whispers, moving one of Clara’s flyaway hairs away from her eye. Her perfect hair has been turning tangled and messy, the more she and Brandy have been in this frozen world. Brandy tells her she likes to see it that way. 

“I want to stay like this forever,” Clara whispers back. 

This takes Brandy by surprise– she freezes, tilts away from Clara, separates their bodies. She pushes with her feet to move further and hits her elbow on the piano. The bang is loud.

“I– it’s so complicated.”

“What do you mean?”

“I love being here. I feel like I was always meant to be here with you, to know you. Even before, when I’d watch the– when I’d see you on screen, I was mesmerized by you. But I have a whole life to get back to. Outside of here. And I can’t have both.” 

Her eyes grow marbled and shiny with unshed tears, but she moves her face away before Clara can see them fall. 

“What do you think it would be like, if we met outside of here? In the real world?” Clara asks this, phrases this as though she’s trying to cheer up Brandy, and gives them a distraction. But in reality this has been something Clara has been thinking about every day; something that she allows to flood her brain while she falls asleep, while she swims in the ocean or drives in the car or watches Brandy cook them both dinner in the fancy hotel kitchen. It only occurs to her now that it could be cathartic to include Brandy in this fantasy of hers; a life outside of here. A happy place for them both.

Brandy doesn’t turn right away. Clara watches as she pulls an arm up to her face, probably wiping away tears to compose herself before revealing her countenance.

When she does turn, there’s a new softness and lightness in her. Hope, Clara realizes. Not hope that they’ll be together out in the real world, but that there is a way to allow reprieve from the reminder of the two opposite worlds Brandy wants to belong in, and that she can only be in one at a time.

“I think,” she starts, slowly, “if we were together out in the real world, we’d live in a house by the sea. Like this hotel, but our own. We’d have a huge bed– like an Ultra King. And one of those huge duvets that feels like a giant fluffy cloud. And it would be mint green, with mint green pillows to match.”

Clara feels her own tears coming, wanting so badly to be in this world that Brandy has created. She allows herself to close her eyes, picturing it. She lets her hands find Brandy, hugging her, kissing her cheek. “We could wake up early and go for a swim, then come back and have breakfast together out on the porch,” she adds, rubbing her nose along Brandy’s face. She hears Brandy’s breath heave– a leftover from her tears– and rubs Brandy’s back. 

“I’d be acting, you’d be acting. Like a powerhouse couple. Except no paparazzi would follow us home or try to find us on the streets. They’d just respect our privacy, somehow. So we’d go to little cafes and go to painting classes and pottery classes and nobody would even bat an eyelash. Then we’d be on red carpets together, winning Oscars and Tonys and Emmys.”

“But no Grammys, because neither of us can sing,” Clara adds. A joke– and Brandy laughs. “And we’d host dinner parties with all of our friends. You’d be the bartender, I’d make all the toasts. And we’d dance all night in our living room.” 

“And then I’d take you back up to our room–”

“--With the mint green duvet–”

“--and we’d make love and have so many orgasms. And we’d be in a little house by the sea with no neighbors close by, so we could make all the sounds we wanted.” 

Clara opens her eyes, lets her eyelashes flutter against the side of Brandy’s face. They both giggle now, imagining this world they live in.

“I can’t wait,” Clara whispers. 

“Me either.” Another tear begins to wrestle from Brandy’s eye, going unnoticed at first. Clara wipes it away with her thumb, kisses her cheek. 

“All we need to do is think about that as our future. Because what’s stopping us?”

They sit on the floor for who knows how long, before Brandy slow gets up, begins to try to play piano again. Clara comes up alongside her, begins to play Clair de Lune for the millionth time, entrancing the both of them. But this time, she plays by putting her fingers underneath Brandy’s, leading both of their hands across the keys, moving together.

When the song finishes, Clara feels the hot tears burning inside her, anger that this can end at any time. Anger that she’s not real, anger that even Dorothy couldn’t have dreamed of the happy ending that she and Brandy had just conjured up. Angry at the unfairness of it all. She feels too real and too substantial to just be a pawn in someone else’s game. 

“Whatever happens, in whatever world I’m in, I’ll remember you and all that you are, just so you know,” Brandy whispers. 

Clara doesn’t respond. She keeps her hands beneath Brandy’s, and starts to play Clair de Lune again. 

92 Days After The Simulation Froze

Clara sits outside by the beach with an easel and paints. A painter who had been attempting to capture the landscape stands frozen in position by the boardwalk, allowing for Clara to easily steal his supplies for herself. She originally thought she’d try to do what the painter had been doing– paint the sand and ocean in front of her, try to get an idea for the image in front of her.

But instead, as she paints, she finds herself trying to paint images from memory. Easily, she draws up Brandy’s face, dressed as Alex Palmer and her movie-husband’s silhouette in the background. There is an ease in allowing these inserted memories to be drawn out onto the canvas; a shadowy piano with the dog Bon-Bon lying beneath it, the bartender frozen in place at the end of the bar who attempted to serve her poison so many eons ago, it seemed.

For hours, she paints Alex’s– no, Brandy’s– hands, face, body.

The deeper she goes into her mind’s eye, though, something begins to happen– the memories of the real world begin to filter in. She is able to picture the woman– the one that the real life Dorothy bestowed her affections on. It fades in and out, threatens to disappear completely when she tries to hone in on the mental image, but Clara pushes herself. She closes her eyes, tries to get out wisps of details. The shape of the woman’s face, the curl of her hair, the curve of her nose. 

It’s once she’s finished the portrait, looking at is as though she has just created a portal to another world, that she hears a “hmmm” behind her and startles up out of the sand.

“Who is that?” Brandy asks. She doesn’t touch Clara, doesn’t look at her. The question was asked with a hint of iciness that is unfamiliar to Clara. She realizes with a start that it’s jealousy.

“I don’t know her name,” Clara admits. “She’s from Dorothy’s world. I want to try to understand who she was. It makes me feel real, like I’m connected to something else.”

“But you’re not Dorothy.” Clara whips around, ready to argue again, defend herself as real for the millionth time– though she knows Brandy is struggling to make sense of it all, same as Clara.

“I’m Clara, I know. But in the real world–”

“But we need to remember you were never in the real world. You were created to be Clara, the character. I know you’re real, you’re as real as me, somehow. But you’re different. You have her face but not her… her life. Not her soul. This woman,” Brandy flicks a hand towards the canvas, “was nothing to you. To Dorothy, but not to you.”

“I’m not painting her because I’m hoping for a reconciliation. I’m trying to understand the things in my head, all of the information that flooded my head when I stepped into that black void. You know this.”

“I don’t see why her face matters.”

“Stop this at once, Alex. I love you, I think. Really. I just need to–”

“Did you just call me Alex?”

“Sorry, I’m– my mind is so clouded. Brandy. I have so many thoughts that I–”

“You don’t love me. Don’t say things like that to me.” Tears fill her eyes, and confusion bubbles up from Clara’s stomach into her neck, clenches her throat shut so that she can’t breathe. 

“I do love you. And I think, dare I say, that you love me too.”

“Clara, my dear, you just called me Alex . And to say ‘I love you’ for the first time using a character name only tells me that you’ve been programmed to fall in love with the Dr. Alex Palmer character. It isn’t about me. Maybe none of this is about me. Me, Brandy Friday. ”

“Brandy, no, it isn’t… you know it isn’t–”

“I’m taking a walk. Don’t follow me.”

Brandy leaves then, walks down the windless boardwalk. Clara imagines the sounds of seagulls and ocean waves, sounds that she realizes she only knows because it’s something Clara is supposed to know; because Clara came to this hotel to be by the beach. 

She wishes she had the strength to punch her hand through the canvas, break the mystery woman’s face right down the middle, but she can’t. It’s proof to herself that she’s more than just a character in a film, as Brandy says. She’s angry with herself for mixing up the names, so caught up in her own mind with what it means, the characters, her memories, what she knows and what she doesn’t know.

Brandy hadn’t even had a chance to see the other paintings– the love letters to each part of Brandy’s body.

Angrily, Clara picks up all the canvases and storms off the beach. She briefly stops to deposit the paints and brushes back by the still-life-esque painter, still looking out at the sea with a hand poised over the easel.

Clara returns to the hotel, feeling rage emanating off of every limb, every piece of her skin. She beelines for the walls and throws off the fancy framed paintings, tossing them onto the floor haphazardly. In it’s place, she puts up the paintings of Brandy– Brandy, not of “Alex.” She isn’t sure how long she had been sitting out there, but the seven paintings fill the lobby. She looks at the new wall art, feeling satisfied that her point will be proven and she will make Brandy feel shame-filled that her initial response to a declaration of love was to deny it’s meaning and run away.

She hides the original paintings from the walls along with the portrait of the mystery woman. It doesn’t matter, really, who she is. She’s a ghost of Dorothy’s life, proof that somehow they are connected. It’s symbolic to Clara of the fact that she isn’t just “a computer,” as Brandy has called her in moments of ire. She as the essence of something genuine, living and breathing and real. It can’t be denied; not with the memories of the mystery woman right beneath the surface.

Brandy doesn’t come back for hours. Clara decides to go up to her room and go to sleep; to allow Brandy to return and have to sit with it all and face it herself.

119 Days After The Simulation Froze

Clara wakes to the feeling of Brandy’s hand moving up the side of Clara’s body– trailing it like a streetcar along a backroad. She shivers, turning to face her. Only when they’re both lying down are their faces this close and side by side; when they stand up, even with Clara’s heels, Brandy towers over her. Clara likes to savor this moment, when she can look right into Brandy’s eyes, absorb every single eyebrow hair and eyelash across her face. Sometimes she wonders what colors she’s missing out on.

Brandy tries to describe it, but it feels too painful that they may never know. The color of the sky, of Brandy’s eyes, her skin, her lips. Brandy is less sure of Clara’s colors– all she’d ever seen of Dorothy was in black and white.

But nothing feels as clear-cut when they delve anywhere further.

“What is your real life like?” She whispers to Brandy, reaching her own arm up to lightly trace Brandy’s eyebrow. She nudges the pillow under her chin to get a clearer view.

“My real life?”

“The one outside of here. The one that’s colorful, where you’re not a doctor and you’re not stuck here.” Her voice softens at the end. She doesn’t know if Brandy still feels stuck here.

Clara doesn’t feel that way… anymore. 

“My real life…” Brandy muses. She pushes herself onto her back, staring at the ceiling of Clara’s hotel room. She sighs, deep in thought. They rarely talk of Brandy’s other world. 

“I’m a lot like the real you, in a way. Dorothy.” 

“How so?”

“Well… I’m an actress, too. You know that part. And… she was trying to be happy and take roles that could advance her career, but felt something was missing.”

“And then she died.”

So there it was.

“Yeah, and then she died.” 

“Do you think you’ll suffer that same fate as well? If you were to return?”

“No, I don’t think so.” She pauses, thinks. “Things are different, where I am. I was feeling unfulfilled but not for the same reasons as Dorothy. Where I was from… Dorothy wouldn’t have had to hide so much of herself from the world. And I was never really hiding myself, either, because… I guess because I didn’t have to think about it.” She reels back, as if discovering a revelation. “I wasn’t really ‘in the closet,’ but I wasn’t… not ‘in the closet?’” 

“How do you mean?”

“I don’t even know what I mean at this point.” 

“Were you like me, out there? Trying to fit into the boxes of what people wanted you to be? Playing parts in roles that help you to escape from the chaos of everything else? From the flashes of memories that I’ve seen, being in films let Dorothy express herself and show passion in ways she had to restrain herself in every other part of her life. I can’t even fathom it now, here. With you.”

Brandy is silent. Clara knows she still doesn’t fully understand the connection between Dorothy and Clara, the way she isn’t Dorothy and can never be but some part of her, somehow, is here anyway. 

“I think that’s why I can feel her,” Clara adds. “I think Dorothy put so much of herself into Clara that we’re… of the same mind.”

“It just doesn’t make sense. It’s so… I wouldn’t even know how to explain it. We’re in the 1940s, and even in 2025 this is too weird for the dots to connect. But then again, I went to Tisch School of the Arts and not MIT. I can act up a storm but don’t expect me to figure out all this modern day techie mumbo jumbo.”

“It isn’t about technology, Brandy, it’s what I can feel. ” She looks at Brandy– really looks at her– trying to think of the planted memories of Dr. Alex Palmer, of the husband she supposedly has, of everything from Before. 

“I know. But you don’t– I saw the machines that made this. My real body, out there, strapped down to a table with wires and buttons and everything all around me. I can’t wrap my head around how any of this makes sense. It’s like ChatGPT catching feelings.”

“Catching… feelings…?”

“Never mind. It’s also funny because this is all AI but it’s also the 1940s. You, Clara, are so 1940s.”

“Maybe I shouldn’t be. Would that help to separate it all?”

Clara feels a thrill at this as she says it– removing the “Dorothy” from herself, removing the “Movie Clara.”

“Yes. Let’s find all the makeup.” Brandy’s eyes buzz with excitement, her smile so wide that Clara can’t help but smile back– full, open-mouthed, teeth-showing smile. Something Clara isn’t quick to be able to do.

Together they run through the hotel rooms, easily finding the makeup bags in the powder rooms, in little bags on bedside tables, in the purses of the frozen female guests walking in the lobby of the hotel. Clara takes a shower to wash her hair and clean off her 1940s-era makeup from her face.

They sit down on the seats where they first met and spoke, where Bon Bon drank the poisoned drink, for Brandy to do the makeover.

Brandy kneels in front of Clara, carefully taking different makeup products and gently applying them to Clara’s face. The soft touches send continuous thrills through Clara’s body as she closes her eyes, feeling the feathery brushes of Brandy’s hand, letting Brandy take the lead. She can hear her breathing, the smell of peppermint from the mints Brandy keeps taking from the tiny bowl in front of the concierge desk, that seems to be endless. 

During the silence, Clara finds herself wondering again– what if her attraction to Brandy really is only because she’s programmed that way? Or, what if Brandy is only doing any of these because they are the only two people here and it’s all a game to her?

She knows Brandy sees her for her more than half the time. She just wishes she could pull Brandy out of those moments where she remembers the world outside, or the way Clara was created. When they connect, they connect. And then out of nowhere, Brandy will have a moment where she treats Clara like a piece of furniture.

“Just the lipstick left,” Brandy notes. She opens up a tube and playfully put some on her own lips, then leans forward to Clara and kisses her deeply, her hands grasping for Clara’s upper arm and neck. Clara forgets what they’re even doing, a hunger in her reaching for Brandy back, losing herself to the moment.

When she releases her, Brandy giggles, takes a napkin and dabs away the smears of lipstick that definitely went beyond the strict borders of Clara’s lip line.

“Now, you’re hair.” Brandy takes a brush, smoothing out all of Clara’s hair– straight, and what Brandy explains as “probably blonde.” There’s a forlornness in this kind of comment– the way they’re colorless, blind to so many parts of each other, even when they try to fill in the blanks. “We don’t have the curlers and straighteners that I’m used to here, so I’m improvising something.” 

Whatever it is Clara is doing, she is barely paying attention. She lets her mind drift away again, sensing nothing more than the way Brandy’s fingers flow through her hair, massage her head, tickle the side of her ear.

Disappointment floods Clara when Brandy pulls away, says she’s finished.

“Do you want to look in the mirror?”

“FIrst, I want to do you. ” 

Brandy’s eyebrows shoot up, but Clara laughs mischievously. 

“Sit down in the chair. My turn.” 

“Oh, well okay then.” 

Brandy sits. Clara takes a washcloth and dips it into a cup of water, slowly wipes away the makeup covering Brandy’s face. It reminds her of painting on the canvases– the ones hanging on the wall around them now. She knows this face so well, these lines and bits and pieces that make up Brandy. 

She realizes this gives her a chance to stare, bask at Brandy. She kisses the end of Brandy’s nose, causing Brandy to scrunch up and smile. 

The makeup isn’t anything special, once she’s finished. She insists Brandy stay seated, and runs to find an outfit to put Brandy in. She finds a a long coat, trousers, and a vest that seem ambiguous to her as far as gender. Perfect.

They look in the mirror together, giggling and basking at the new looks they’ve given each other.

The two women go out for a walk in their new clothes, and Brandy keeps stealing glances at Clara.

“Do you like me better this way?” Clara asks, hesitant.

“Not better. I have always like you for you. But I like that this is so deviated from the character, it sort of… removes that whole part of it. Separates you a little.”

“That was my intention.”

“I love that you wanted to do it.”

They keep walking, silent. They walk along the boardwalk, passing the painter with the disrupted art supplies from Clara’s visits to the beach.

“Do you think we’ll age here? Do we stay the same?” Clara blurts out the question without meaning to. She’s afraid of losing her time here, and equally afraid of what will happen if they’re stuck here forever.

Brandy doesn’t answer. She slows, begins to rub her arm and look at the ground. “I… don’t know.”

“Thank you for days and moments like this.” Clara doesn’t know why she needs to say this sometimes, except that deep down she knows this can’t be forever. Someone brought Brandy in here with her, and at some point, she will be pulled out.

Right?

178 Days After The Simulation Froze

“ Clara. Clara, I have an idea. ” Clara flutters open her eyes, finding Brandy on top of her, straddling her with one leg on either side of the silk sheets that Clara is cozied inside of.

“What is it?” sleep courses through her, unable to pull herself off the soft pillow. Brandy’s voice only serves to lull her back into a dream– at first.

“I don’t know how long we’ll be here, only that we’ve been here for so long. So. Long. And… well. I want to be with you forever.”

“Me too. Forever,” Clara mumbles. She smiles, reaches a hand out to try to find Brandy while keeping her eyes shut. 

Brandy grabs her hand, pulls it to her face to force Clara to cup Brandy’s cheek. 

“Then let’s…” Brandy pauses, takes a breath. “Let’s get married.”

Clara shoots up. She’s awake now.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I mean, obviously not like a marriage marriage. But let’s have a wedding. It’s not like we’re lacking on time. Today can be our wedding day, we can do the whole shebang. Whaddaya say? Will you marry me?”

“Well, where’s the ring? Surely you aren’t attempting to propose with a ring.”

Brandy feigns shock, pats at her sides where fake-sewn pockets rest by her hips. “Oh no! The ring! Where’s the ring!”

Clara tsks. “Well that won’t do. I can’t say ‘yes’ to a proposal unless I have a ring.”

“Are you playing hard to get, Miss Clara?”

“I simply know my worth.” She pulls her hand away from Brandy’s face slowly, stroking along Brandy’s jawline to try to tickle her. “I’m going to get dressed. Then perhaps we can go for a nice stroll along the beach.”

Brandy leaves the room, allowing for Clara to frantically search through all of her clothing for the prettiest, frilliest dress she can find. She knows some of the dresses are white and some are black, and that the rest are some unknown color that she won’t be able to ascertain. She wonders for the millionth time what the world would be like if her and Brandy could live together in full color. 

When they meet in the lobby, she sees that Brandy, too, has done her makeup extra nice and has on an outfit that Clara has rarely seen.

Their stroll on the beach takes them to the little bakery on the boardwalk, where they walk in and “borrow” two blueberry muffins from behind the counter. 

“Thank you, Phil, we owe you one,” Brandy graciously yells to the frozen baker with his arms full with a mixing bowl and a large whisk, mid-yell towards a cashier manning the front booth who is about to drop a croissant. Every time they come into the Phil’s Bake Shop, Clara and Brandy argue about whether they should steal the croissant that’s perched in midair, about to hit the bakery’s tiled flooring. They always decide to leave it. 

“That’s a lovely gray dress you’re wearing,” Brandy comments to Clara. “It’d be a shame if you got these grayberries on your dress and stained the gray with a gray color.”

“I like to believe this dress is yellow,” Clara retorts. “And your outfit is a dark maroon.”

“Oh really ? And how do you propose that to be the colors?”

“Because it can be whatever I want it to be. And why not? Brandy Friday you just like to feel high and mighty because you can tell me what the color of an apple would be if the apple were out there and not in here. But you’re just as gray as me.”
“I resent that.”

“Because I suppose I’m right, aren’t I?” Clara turns to Brandy, scrunching up her face into a smirk. 

“Oh, hey, what’s that?” Brandy nods her chin in front of them, down towards the end of the beach. Clara turns, expecting to find the same frozen pair of seagulls that they always see near the end of the beach– they’ve named them Henry and Etta, on account of an argument they once had about the name “Henrietta.” Neither of them knew how to determine bird gender, so they chose for them. 

However, Henry and Etta have been moved– one to the left by the boardwalk, and one to the right, closer to the water. In the middle, tiny pebbles spell out “WILL YOU MARRY ME?” and, at the bottom, a necklace box that’s opened to reveal a velvet pillow with a diamond ring nestled right in the middle.

Clara gasps, tears filling her eyes unexpectedly. “What is this?”

“Didn’t you want a ring?”

“I–”

“Let’s get married. Then we can just pretend to be married. We’re here anyway. No more Dr. Palmer, no more feeling like this is all temporary and we’re stuck in limbo. Even if we’re just doing it to do it. Why not?”

Clara realizes that at some point she went down on her knees, her legs digging into the sand, and she crawls forward, reaches the jewelry box. The ring is big, shiny, and fits just right on her finger.

“Where did you find this?”

“Plenty of people here who aren’t in need of their jewelry right now. They won’t miss it.”

She inches forward more, feels compelled to reach out and touch the stones that spell out the question. It’s silly– they won’t really be getting married, it won’t change anything– but somehow it all symbolizes something bigger. Their commitment to each other, their willingness to spend each day as it comes alongside one another. A declaration of all kinds.

Suddenly, Brandy is next to her. Embracing her. 

“Well?”
Clara opens her mouth to answer, shuts it again. Instead, she starts to take from the pebbles closest to her, spelling out “YES.”

Brandy pulls her in, kissing her, feeling the cold warmth of the half-sunned sand beneath them.

When she breaks away, Brandy stands up and walks ahead. “I have my vows. Do you need a moment for yours? I can go first.”

Clara laughs. She wants to pull Brandy right back, grab her, hug her, smell her. It’s odd, the way rushes of emotion make her want to take Brandy in with all of her senses. It makes her think of women who say a baby is so cute they can just “eat them up.” She wants Brandy as close to her as humanly possible. Craves it.

Brandy backs away from her, darting off in backwards hops with a chuckle. “No, no, no my betrothed! Vows first, then the wedding night after. ”

“Rascal.”

Brandy winks, then takes out a piece of paper from the pocket of her coat. 

“You truly wrote vows?” Clara moves to snatch the paper, to read it. She has no idea where to even begin if they are to really do this. “I didn’t have time to write my own!”

“Yeah because this was my surprise for you. ”

“It takes two people to do wedding vows. I may be an animated… electronic.. whatever… but I know how matrimonial ceremonies work, my love.”

“Then let’s just speak from the heart. No written words. No predetermined vows.” Brandy crumples up the paper, unread, and looks directly at Clara. “I already know how I feel anyway.”

Clara’s heart beats about eleven thousand times per second. She has an image fly into her head, of her heart beating so fast that it becomes to function like a ceiling fan, whirling around the air between the two of them and suctioning Brandy to her. 

“Clara. We’ve been here for… who even knows how long. I stopped counting the days, because I was just enjoying the time I had with you, every morning, afternoon, and night. And let me tell you something… that is not the kind of person I have ever been, in my whole entire life. When this all first started, I was marking the days. Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. Day one, day two day, day three. It’s always been important to me to keep track, to take myself out of my emotions, to count and label and map things out.” A tear streams down Brandy’s face as she talks, grasping onto Clara’s hands as if there is really an officiator between them, conducting the ceremony.

“But being here with you changed all of that in me. Because with the two of us, we can just be two minds… two souls . For however long we have. And you’ve made me become a brighter, more creative, happier version of myself, because that’s who you just are. You’re thoughtful, inquisitive, you don’t let anyone else box you in. You have defied all odds and have this beautiful, crazy mind of your own that is so full of ideas and love and passion that you’re larger than life and more human than anyone I’ve ever met.”

Clara smiles at her, laughs through her own tears. “How on earth am I supposed to follow that speech?” she jokes. 

She continues to hold Brandy’s hands in hers, squeezing them and loosening her grip a few times as she thinks.

“Brandy Friday, when we first met, I thought you were Dr. Alex Palmer. And I liked Alex. But not because she was a doctor, or because of how she dressed. It was confusing, even, the way I was pulled towards this person I had just met. I felt like when we talked, it went beyond the simple conversation we were having. I felt a… a connection. I didn’t understand it, didn’t know how it made sense. It was a spark, but one that had nothing substantial.”

Brandy rolls her eyes. 

“But then I got to know Brandy Friday, you, the one behind Alex Palmer. And she… well. She was interesting, and surprising, and vulnerable. She was all the things that Alex Palmer had been holding back, but even better, because Brandy was real. Brandy, you have so much life in you, so many things you allow yourself to be open to. You let yourself learn and grow, let yourself trust even when you don’t fully understand things yourself. You’re playful even though you’ve been an adult for long enough to have lost that part of yourself. And, I now realize, the only parts of Dr. Alex Palmer that I was attracted to were the parts of yourself that even an acting role couldn’t hide. It was always you, Brandy. All this time. And I am so grateful that the world stopped to let us know each other.”

As soon as she is finished, Brandy pulls her in, kisses her fiercely. Dips her down, the way those getting married often do, but it makes Clara giggle as she feels Brandy wrap an arm around her back to hold her steady. 

“I do,” Brandy says after the fact.

“How out of order we are! I do, too.” 

“Now it’s time for the after party.” Brandy pulls Clara ahead, back up onto the boardwalk and past it, onto a grassy field where frozen picnickers sit lounging in the sun. Brandy pulls her forward more, to a faraway tree with a canopy of branches and leaves. A picnic blanket has been set up, pillows sprawled across the surface, and bed sheets draped over branches to create a tent of sorts.

“What is all this?”

Brandy shrugs. “After party. Honeymoon. Wedding night.”

Clara understands. Understands so well, in fact, that she pulls Brandy right into the tent, pulling off Brandy’s clothes as she goes. 

The Day It All Ends

Clara stares in front of a mirror looking at herself, trying to decide how to do her hair for the day. She has been experimenting with the “modern” styles that Brandy has been showing her, interspersed with the “classic” styles that come more naturally to her. She isn’t sure what she and Brandy will do today, but thinks it’s time for a surprise of her own. She may try to plan a scavenger hunt for Brandy– the prize being, perhaps, something silly for Brandy to do. 

Brandy sometimes wakes up before Clara, leaving their bed to go wander the perimeters of the land. She can still feel Brandy on her– her hands on the insides of her thighs, her face against Clara’s neck. It makes her feel warm, solid. Satisfied.

It’s while she pulls back a strand of hair that she feels the first jolt. A churning in her stomach, a glitch in the world around her, like a lightning strike through everything in sight. She feels dizzy, unsettled. Like she is being rewound.

Clara blinks once.

Suddenly, Brandy is in front of her. They are in the lobby, standing in front of one another. And something is very, very off. Brandy stands in her Alex Palmer suit, she in the original dress she wore when they first met.

And everyone is moving. The lobby is a cacophony of sounds, movements, smells. BonBon the dog, alive and well, sits with his owner.

They are back in time. 

This is before everything. Their first conversation ever.

Clara holds in her tears, wishing to blurt all of her fear and love and confusion to Brandy, but instead she is met with a block, an inability to freely speak and move. Something unknown holding her in place, like a marionette on strings. They knew this day might come, but it had felt so far away, so… impossibly gone. 

She feels herself silenced, as whatever controls her forces her to say the lines as they are, make the movements the way she is supposed to. Only her eyes can give away her memories, and she fears Brandy isn’t looking close enough.

Brandy says her lines. Clara responds, the way Clara is supposed to. The narrative– the story with the fake Alex and the “Clara” that she’s meant to be– is overwhelming her. It keeps on going, her body (whatever it may be, she isn’t quite clear what exactly “she” even is) goes through the motions, responding to the storyline.

Part of her begins to fade away, settling into the story, into whatever two-dimensional being she is supposed to be; even despite knowing that she is more. Because she made herself into something more.

And then.

And then.

It begins to change.

Brandy messed up. Or the storyline is already messed up. Or something else beyond anyone’s control has messed up.

And with it, is a crack.

A crack for Clara to reach into, to try to pull herself out with as much agency as she can muster. Her heart breaks for Brandy, who looks to have been lost and abandoned by Clara, with no clue that Clara is right here. Right in front of her.

The crack isn’t much. But it means saying lines she wasn’t meant to say, making moves that “Clara” wasn’t supposed to make.

She gets more glimpses of Brandy, clearly experiencing her own turmoil. She doesn’t know exactly who Kimmy is, who secretly speaks to Brandy from the sky or inside her head or wherever it is, but they’ve done this. Erased all of their time, erased their freedom. Erased the endless days of sitting in bed, of painting on the sea, of driving through the town and sharing their darkest secrets, of getting married on the sand. 

She misses Brandy’s hand on her hip, over her own hand. She wants to feel Brandy’s fingers on the back of her neck, lightly brushing across her shoulders and arms to pull her closer.

But Brandy stays at a distance, and continues to look right past her. It’s almost as heartbreaking as everything else, that she can’t figure out how to beckon to Brandy that she’s still here. She’s still the Clara she’s known all this time. Brandy is looking at her how she looked at her in the beginning of this all–like a robot. Like a soulless creature.

Brandy leaves the scene. Clara continues to go through the motions, her body forcing her to interact and engage with the scene against her will, if she even has a will. She isn’t supposed to have a will at all, she knows that much. Or a consciousness, yet here she is.

Is this going to be her now? Forever, locked in this world where she will never see whether an apple is green or red? Where Brandy will return to her world and leave Clara all alone, again? To die some sort of lonely death like her real-life counterpart Dorothy did, in this sea of frozen, soulless people?

No.

She won’t let it.

If Brandy is going to have to leave her here, she may as well die herself. Having an eternal consciousness to sit around forever sounds more unbearable than anything else. Even without Brandy in the room with her, and with the heavy emotions and loud words being emitted from the other characters, the sense of lifelessness is palpable. It is just Clara in here. Even unfrozen, the only people are Brandy and Clara.

She can’t stay once Brandy is gone.

Brandy rushes in, and Clara begins to push back against her own character. Takes the gun, takes the shot. 

More come. She doesn’t know how this works, doesn’t know what will happen. She shoots again, feels her body (is this considered a body?) get shot, pain surprisingly shooting throgh her as she drops to the ground.

Brandy grabs her, holds her. Cries for her. Slips her hands underneath Clara’s body, pulling her close.

Finally, Brandy’s hand on her neck, and for this. 

It’s okay, she wants to whisper to Brandy. It had to end this way.

She also senses that Brandy is finally seeing her again, not just as the character but as the woman she spent all those months with, all that time talking and exploring the life of Dorothy, hearing about Brandy’s own life in limited ways. Some sort of vague world beyond this one, with not only colorful apples but colors in everything. Who would Clara be, if she was real?

She lets her eyes close, listening to Brandy’s final words.

“Forevermore,” she cries.

The Day After

The world fades to black. 

Clara finds herself standing, once again, in the endless black sea, with nothingness in every direction. 

She becomes flushed with more information: Dorothy, again. The behind the scenes details of the shooting of the original movie– Hotel Reverie. Information about Dorothy’s death, of Hollywood, of each of the actors following the release of the hit film, of what happened to the stage hand that had caught Dorothy’s eye throughout the entire production.

The information becomes rapid– filling her mind increasingly, facts and articles flying past her minds’ eye like fast forwarded newsreels.

Her world becomes louder, brighter, unbearable.

Clara covers her eyes and ears, crouching down onto the ground into a fetal position– though, she realizes she has never been born, and thus would never have been in fetal position before.

All at once, the sounds fade. The lights dim, the chaos subsides, leaving Clara in a room filled with blinking lights, machines, people, and a gigantic toilet.

And– color.

Reds, oranges, blues, greens, yellows. Vibrant, dull, pastel, metallic. She knows the names and the shades, recognizes them from memories that aren’t her own (Dorothy’s), grasping the thoughts like candies on a quick-moving conveyor belt.

Nobody seems to notice her– people are constructing what appears to be a bathroom built for a giant– and she slips out into the bright and blue outdoors of some sort of city.

She’ll find Brandy. She knows she will.