Disclaimer: That '70s Show copyright The Carsey-Werner Company, LLC and Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, LLC. The fictional band Degenerate Matter, their albums Vagabondage, Ultrarelativistic, WIMPs and MACHOs, Frozen Stars, the song "Singularity," and all the lyrics contained therein copyright to the author of this story (username: MistyMountainHop, maker of Those '70s Comics).

CHAPTER 50
ATOMIC TRANSITION

March 21, 1995

Foster City, California

Jackie's House
…

Jackie's phone rang, but she didn't pick it up. She was lounging on her bed, flipping through a jewelry-making magazine. The late-morning sun filtered in through her windows. Foster City was a cool fifty-degrees, but her flannel pajamas kept her warm. In Minnesota, this would be considered a beach day, but it didn't qualify in California.

The phone rang a second time, and her answering machine picked up. She hadn't changed the out-going message. As far as the wider world was concerned, she still hadn't come home. Her perceived absence was beneficial in several ways, including making the paparazzi disappear. But she hadn't left the house since returning on Sunday. She let Patricia do the shopping and tried not to flashback to her lost years, when she wouldn't leave the safety of her dad's home.

"Jackie, darling, I simply cannot tolerate your sister's antics any longer," Ann-Marie's latest message went. "One of her cohorts wrote a muckraking article about the Wintry hotel chain. It was published in The LA Times, darling. The LA Times!"

Jackie snorted and turned a page in her magazine. Her mom was devious, but Ann-Marie's selfishness had finally caught up to her.

"She refuses to fess up, but I know it was her," Ann-Marie continued. "She's exacting revenge for the slight I committed at your birthday party. But her husband's little rock band is nothing compared to your friend's. An article about Degenerate Matter came out today. It was all over the morning news. Ecliptic could never generate that kind of publicity, not without committing capital murder."

Jackie snatched her remote from the night table and turned on the TV. She searched through the channels, but she was an hour early for the noon news.

"Damn," she muttered. She'd woken up late this morning and read the newspaper, but this was her first time watching TV today. She'd just have to wait for Patricia to return from the store.

Ann-Marie's sigh crackled through the answering machine. "I supposed there's nothing you can do about it, is there? Your sister's more stubborn than Deborah. She'll keep picking at me until she's satisfied, but I won't give into her brand of barbarism. It's a miracle you turned out as well as you did, considering you grew up with a woman like that!"

The answering machine stopped recording. Ann-Marie had hung up.

Jackie's exhaled a shaky breath and shut off the TV. So far, she'd been a witness to the Blonde Brigade's drama, not a participant, but that couldn't last. She had no other social group to join if this one exiled her. But during her lost years, she'd exiled herself. Withdrew from all her friends. Only her relationship with her dad had kept her from total seclusion.

She had no one to spend evenings with anymore, though. No other friends who lived nearby. If she didn't stay in the Blonde Brigade, she'd be isolated again. Her occasional trips out of state, to visit people she truly cared about, wouldn't be enough. The walls would close in and collapse on her.

She pulled a hunk of her unkempt hair in front of her eyes. Brunette wasn't blond. She had to get it re-bleached, but her body didn't want it.

The front door slammed closed downstairs. The force of it vibrated through the house, and Jackie hurried to the living room. Patricia had returned from shopping. Grocery bags dangled from her thick arms, and a shopping bag from Elegant Beads was among them.

"Ms. Burkhart," Patricia said, "could you...?"

Jackie took the Elegant Beads bag from her and put it on the coffee table. She also grabbed two of the grocery bags. They were heavy, and Patricia thanked her.

"Thank you," Jackie said and accompanied her to the kitchen. She'd chosen her housekeeper well. Patricia often went above and beyond her duties, understood Jackie's peculiarities and didn't judge her for them, at least not aloud. Running a bed and breakfast had likely exposed her to people just as strange. "Did you get the magazine?"

"That I did."

Together, they lined the grocery bags at the foot of the kitchen counter. Jackie crouched by them and found a copy of Bad Radio Magazine. The cover photo showed Ro Skirving swinging on the lighting truss while the rest of Degenerate Matter played below her. Its caption read: "Exploring Degenerate Matter, Their Outer and Inner Spaces".

Patricia set to making lunch, a charred chicken piccata, and Jackie sat at the breakfast table. She opened Bad Radio to the Degenerate Matter article, caught a glimpse of the first picture, and closed the magazine. Her thumb kept her place, but the image of Ro and Steven appearing cozy together glittered in her mind.

She opened the magazine again, and her eyes fixed on Donna's byline. Donna had stayed true to her values, her integrity, and her career was derailed for it. But now her career was soaring because of that integrity … and Jackie was procrastinating.

Steven's words to her in Duluth still needed to be processed, their effect on her: "You kept me alive. … You still are." She'd put off her next therapy session until she felt ready to leave her house, but that was probably a mistake. Reading Donna's article had to be one, too, but she began to read anyway.

"'Fame is bullshit,' says Ro Skirving, and her fiancé, Steven Hyde, agrees. He's better known to Degenerate Matter fans as O. MacNeil, the band's lyrical secret weapon."

The feature discussed Ro first, how she was raised by a single father who pushed her to follow in his footsteps into astrophysics. But she rebelled and started her first band at nineteen-years-old with Lee Turnbull. Music, though, remained at the forefront of Donna's questions, what bands Ro listened to as a child, if they influenced her own sound. How her process of writing music compared to writing lyrics.

After that, the feature went into Steven's relationship with Degenerate Matter and Ro. It explored how he'd lived a double-life as a steel-dog roadie and the A&R executive who'd both signed the band and guided the recording of its first album:

"'I thought he was an old man,'" Skirving says about her first impressions of Hyde. 'His beard, his sunglasses, his beat-up baseball cap. Then on tour, I saw him with a naked face. He'd let his hair down, literally, and I couldn't keep my eyes off him as he helped set up the lighting rig. I had no idea who he was,' but when she realized the long-haired, muscular roadie was the same man who'd signed Degenerate Matter, 'I lost my shit. He looked twenty years younger.'

"'You're fuckin' exaggerating,' Hyde interjects, and Skirving tells him—with an amused and all-knowing grin—that she was the one staring at him, so she would know what he looked like."

Jackie's palms grew sweaty as she continued to read. Donna's writing was fluid, and Jackie's eyes devoured it even as her heart pounded against her ribs. The closeness between Steven and Ro was evident in their interview, even when they had differing points of view:

"I ask them about the space imagery in their lyrics, and Skirving says, "I write them from rage, thanks to my da shoving astronomy down my throat,' but Hyde has a different stance.

"'I've always dug that kind of stuff,' he says. 'I used to search the night sky for UFOs with friends of mine in high school. 'Course we were stoned, and it was after we'd seen Close Encounters of the Third Kind. My first girlfriend was into stargazing, too, and she taught me a lot. And now Ro teaches me a lot. Helps me get the science-shit right.'

"'It's a price I willingly pay not to write lyrics,' Skirving says, laughing. Her hand slides over Hyde's knee, and they interrupt the interview with a deep, enthusiastic kiss."

"Ew," Jackie whispered. Her appetite soured, but the smell of chicken and lemon saturated the air. Patricia's cooking was too good to waste on emotional disgust.

The discussion shifted at the end of the interview. Steven and Ro disparaged '80s hair-metal bands together with glee: "They weren't about music but money, getting fucked and fucked up," Steven said.

"If they had been about the music," Ro said, "they'd still be making it instead of drowning in their alcohol-and drug-fueled pits of self-pity. Their fame is gone, so their groupies flew the coup."

"Integrity rises to the top, man," Steven said. Then Donna had to ask a question about groupies, and Jackie read Steven and Ro's answers through squinted eyes.

"'Don't know about my groupies,' Skirving says, 'but I'm his. Did a groupie-type thing to him backstage after the show last night.'

"Hyde turns his face away and covers his mouth like he's embarrassed. He's laughing, though, and when he gets ahold of himself, he says, 'And I returned the favor this morning. So I guess I'm her groupie, too. Her number-one groupie."

Jackie slammed the magazine shut and rolled it into a tube. She pressed the sharp end into her forehead. Steven and Ro's words were revealing, more so than the photographs scattered throughout the feature. But, to torture herself further, she poured over the photos, which spanned the last five years. One picture showed Steven and Ro in the band's rehearsal space, working on lyrics. Another showed him as a roadie, loading-in equipment for a gig.

The picture that seized Jackie's mind, however, had been taken backstage at a concert. Steven was pushed up against a brick wall with Ro's hand beneath his shirt. Her hips were settled between his legs, and their faces were less than an inch apart. They were about to kiss.

Jackie stared at the picture a long time, until Patricia served her lunch. That image of Steven and Ro held her thoughts prisoner while she ate. It occupied her afterward, too, but she carried forth with her plans.

She organized her new supplies from Elegant Beads in the living room. Patricia had bought every item on Jackie's list, and the coffee table was covered in wire-wrapping tools, silver-plated artistic wire, and beads. Her jewelry-making magazine was open to a tutorial. The TV was off, but the radio played through her surround-sound speakers. She spent hours twisting wire, and by the end of it she had a necklace, a pair of earrings, and a matching bracelet. They were almost decent enough to wear, but she needed more practice.

Making the jewelry had weakened Steven and Ro's hold on her, both the images and their words from the article. Better yet, trying to create again after so long filled her with pride. Her dad would've been proud, too, and a feeling of him enclosed her like a warm blanket. Original jewelry designs had flitted through her consciousness for weeks, but she had no means to execute them. No knowledge, no skill. The compulsion to change that was growing, but she had no confidence it was the right path to take.

Quietly, she asked her dad's spirit for guidance, and just as quietly "Singularity" started playing on the radio.

"You just had to, didn't you?" Her gaze rose toward the ceiling, toward heaven, and she laughed.

"Singularity" could've been her dad's way of saying stick with Steven. Or maybe his message was in the song itself. Steven's lyrics were full of questions about her, where and how she'd ended up. The two parts that hit her the hardest were the plea, "Please, love, ain't worth dyin' ev'ry night," and, "I push down and push down the one loss I can't lose."

Ro sang Steven's words evocatively, but her voice became plaintive when she begged,"Please, love, ain't worth dyin' ev'ry night." Those were her revised lyrics, at least according to Jackie's theory, replacing her love with his doll. Inserting him into Jackie's position and herself into his.

Jackie dashed across the living room to the bar. She kept pens and a pad of paper in one of the drawers. Crazy ideas were dumping adrenaline into her blood, but she sat on a barstool and jotted them down. She started with, "Please, love, ain't worth dying every night." Beneath this she wrote, "From Ro to Steven."

Next, she wrote, "You kept me alive. You still are." Beneath this she wrote, "From Steven to Jackie."

She stared at her scribbles and tried to reconcile them to coherence. Steven couldn't have died for her every night if she kept him alive. It was nonsense and not worth pondering. She ripped the paper into tiny pieces and tossed them into the trash.

That evening, she obsessed over the possibility she'd gone clinically insane. Watching Frasier, The John Larroquette Show, and NYPD: Blue helped her relax, but once she slid into bed, that relaxation slipped away.

The image of Steven and Ro flared behind her closed eyelids. It was no longer static but in full-motion. Ro shoved Steven against the brick wall and pulled off his shirt. He cupped the back of her head, and her hands pressed into his hard, muscular chest, but Jackie felt his hot skin against her own palms.

She blanked-out her mind, but her heart was throbbing in her ears and between her thighs. She thought about the episode of Frasier she'd watched, but her fantasy reasserted itself. Only, this time, Jackie was the one backstage with Steven.

The imaginary Steven kissed her, and her actual lips tingled. His imaginary hand skimmed over her imaginary waist, and her actual skin prickled.

This kind of desire hadn't risen in her body for over a decade. It was unpolluted and kind, and the further the fantasy played out, the more loved she felt.

Her heart beat frighteningly fast, and she twitched in the bed. She wasn't touching herself. But her body, her pleasure, what she'd believed forever lost was becoming hers again. Slowly and imperfectly but nonetheless hers.

She was lying on her side, and a squeeze of her thighs brought release. Blood and gratitude pulsed through her veins. Her eyes grew wet, and she gripped her comforter. Steven's friendship had done more than return her body to her. He'd given her hope and joy, and she knew now the name for her sickness. The stars had whispered it to her in Duluth: she'd fallen in love with him.

This wasn't the same love from when they were teenagers. That had existed in a lower energy-state since their breakup, having emitted most of its light, like an electron in an atom. But in less than a year, it had absorbed Steven's new light and jumped levels.

She dug her face into her pillow, a futile attempt to keep from crying. He'd left her once when she'd needed him most, doing immense damage to her self-esteem. His loss all those years ago had created a vacuum, one she'd barely survived. One she still deserved an explanation for.

Yet God had connected her soul to his, someone who treated her body and emotions as sacred. A man she couldn't build a life with. It seemed cruel, but that was the lesson, to accept what she could have of him. She used to define herself by the men she was with, then by what they'd done to her. That latter definition had to end. Her validity in this world didn't depend on Steven's—or anyone else's—treatment of her. Her therapist had told her that more than once, but it was a tough belief to have faith in.

March 26, 1995

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Hyde and Ro's House
...

Hyde had picked Ro up from the airport. She'd been on a plane for twenty hours, arriving from Australia. She was untalkative and clearly exhausted, but she rested her head on his shoulder as he drove them home. Startlingly, her exhaustion turned into energy once he locked the door to their house. She kissed him and groped his body. Her lips tasted like airplane peanuts and peppermint, a weird combo.

They'd said little more than, "Hey," to each other in two weeks, but her method of reconciling was fuck first, talk later. He obliged and screwed her on the living room sofa, obeying her non-verbal cues to go hard and fast. He should've come just as fast. He usually did after they'd been separated physically or emotionally, but being separated both ways at once had unsettled him.

As he thrust into her, she threw her head back against the cushions and groaned in pleasure. He tried to stay present, but as beautiful and relieving her joy was to witness—as good as her convulsing around his dick felt—a hollow sensation gnawed at his chest.

He'd spent most of the last week in Milwaukee, at Burnout Records HQ. He'd gone to meetings about the Spasms, listened to demo tapes collected by A&R scouts, and finalized plans for recording Degenerate Matter's fourth album. But throughout all of his work, he'd tried to dissect his words to Jackie in Duluth: "You kept me alive. … You still are."

The statement wasn't hyperbole. Beating Kelso into a bloody pile had shoved Hyde's sense of self six-feet underground. Without Jackie, he would've offed himself in the aftermath. He'd stayed away from her to protect both of them, but her love sparked through his synapses anyway. It combated his self-hatred, bolstered him when he fought for his sobriety. Carried him long enough to meet Ro.

But the part he hadn't figured out yet was the present. Ro was the spark that kept him lit, but his light wasn't self-sustaining. She had faith in his ability to reignite his core, helped him get closer to that goal than he believed possible. But some part deeper than his guts told him that losing Jackie again would be the same as losing himself.

"You've gone soft," Ro said, and her body and face materialized beneath him. His mind had disappeared from their house, from her. His erection was gone, and without asking, she took control. She reversed their positions on the couch and had him in her mouth. He became hard again, but the smell of Four Roses Bourbon burned his nose. It was a charred, slightly sweet aroma, a memory, but it faded once her mouth was off him.

She maintained control as she ground on top of him, but she knew exactly how he liked to be fucked. He kept a tight grip on her hips, which were narrow and somewhat sharp, but she liked the pressure, and the pain cutting into his palms was a constant, reassuring reminder of who he was with: Ro. No one else but Ro.

He came this time, and she sank to his body. Their reunion wasn't ideal, but their way of operating had worked for five years. It had also evolved. No reason it couldn't keep evolving.

"I'm sorry," she said and kissed his neck. "You needed time to process what you had to process, and I shouldn't have been such an asshole about it."

His fingers brushed through her short hair, a sweaty and endearing mess atop her head. "Apology accepted."

They breathed together for a few quiet minutes as their bodies calmed down. And for the first time in a long while, he felt like he was home. Even with the paparazzi stalking their house. Even with security guards doing rounds on their property, which was partly his fault. He didn't have to apologize for how he'd processed his fury at Scotty and at himself, but he felt an urge to explain it. "Went to Jackie's place from Australia."

Ro didn't move except to say, "And?"

"I brought her here."

"Did you fuck her?"

His body flinched. The idea wasn't a flicker in any part of him. "Hell no! We talked. I showed her around Minneapolis. Took her to First Avenue."

"I know all this. You were recognized there. Heard it from Dawn," Degenerate Matter's manager and Lee's sister. "Your love for Jackie made you careless."

Maybe it had. Maybe it always had. "My love for her is important, Spark, but it's platonic."

"How much does she touch you? How much do you touch her?"

"In what way?"

"Every way."

He traced meaningless patterns on Ro's bare back. She allowed the intimate contact without growing stiff on top of him. "Same as the Formans, Forman, my dad, sister, and Betsy do."

"So she's become family, then?"

"I get that family's not your deal, but it is mine. That's somethin' you've got to finally accept if we're gonna work. We'll never have kids, but I chose you over havin' that kind of family. I choose you every freakin' day, even when you think I'm doin' the opposite. Me and Jackie touching … yeah, we're close, but it never crosses a line. Neither me or her wants that, all right? You're the one I..."

Ro caressed his shoulder before kissing it. She might have spotted a glint in his eyes, indicating what lay deeper inside him. He craved to be touched more gently by her—in all ways, but he settled for what she gave him. The alternative was an endless night sky without stars.

"Scotty quit as Lee's guitar tech," she said. "I had nothing to do with it. It was Scotty's idea. He doesn't want to cause the band, or you, any stress."

Hyde was still tracing patterns on her back, but his hands stilled at the news. "So how bad does Lee wanna kick my ass?"

"Don't worry about Lee." She patted his cheek. "He'll get over it." She climbed off him and snatched her jeans from the floor. A cigarette was in her hand moments later. "It's not like he and Scotty won't see each other. They plan on sticking with their side project."

He sat up, and Ro plunked down beside him on the sofa. She lit her cigarette with her lighter, sucked in a long drag, and offered the cigarette to him. He'd been good for over a week, abstaining, but that unwelcome, unexpected flash of memory during her blowjob had weakened his resistance.

She placed the cigarette at his lips, and he accepted it but didn't inhale. She lit another for herself, and her gaze landed on the coffee table. Specifically, on the three copies of Bad Radio Magazine spread out on it. "Did you read it yet?" she said.

He hadn't. "Waited for you."

She cupped his knee. "Romantic. Stupid, but romantic." She picked up two copies of the magazine and passed him one. Then, just in time, she held an ashtray under his chin. A log of ash fell into it. "If you're not going to smoke," she said, "give it here."

He inhaled deeply before she could take the cigarette from him. The end brightened like the sun at dawn, and his lungs burned, and Jackie's voice pleaded through his smoky mind: "I need you to live. Please, Steven, I need you to live," and he stubbed the cigarette out in the ashtray.

She'd never said that to him, but its truth was undeniable. She needed him here, alive. For himself and for her. He might be ignorantly slow-marching toward an early death anyway. A different kind of wolf might be pursuing him, but tobacco and nicotine had lost his scent.

At least for today.

"Waste of a smoke," Ro said, her cigarette bouncing at the corner of her mouth. He was tempted to swipe it from her, but getting her to quit was an impossible task. Only her own will and wish for it would get her there.

Her annoyance faded as they read Donna's article. By the end of it, Ro was on her feet, pacing in front of him naked, and talking excitedly about Degenerate Matter's next album.

"Certain musical refrains could reappear from one song in another, same as the lyrics," she said. "It would be like a rock novel, make our fans do some work. Every time they listen, they'll think and feel on deeper levels."

"You're talkin' concept album," he said.

"Maybe even a double album. Time for some far-reaching subtext." She pointed her cigarette at him, her fourth since she'd come home. "You ready for it?"

"Heard the Smashing Pumpkins are working on somethin' similar."

She laughed derisively. "And it'll probably be pretentious as fuck. Ours is gonna be Shakespeare. With layers that appeal to all strata, not just one."

"And that's not pretentious?"

He was messing with her, but she mashed her cigarette in the ashtray and sat on his lap. "There's not one damn pretentious cell in your body," she said seriously. "In mine? Maybe a few, but you'll flick them away if they get into the lyrics.

She kissed him, and despite her breath tasting like tobacco, her passion for music got him hard enough for another round. Her desire to live—truly live and not just survive—shone bright and hot at her core, addiction to cigarettes notwithstanding. He absorbed what he could, but if he didn't reignite the light of his own core himself soon, the black hole he'd crawled out of would reclaim him.