NICO

"It's just a PREMIERE, Nico, everyone's been to them," Mari twirled one finger (her nails beautifully manicured, blue and glittering with seams of lemon) through her flaxen hair. Nico tried not to think of Maki and failed. Mari did not notice Nico's expression or simply did not care, "Everyone would be happy to meet you. u's is very popular in AMERICA, you know."

Nico had done a lot of odd things in her short, strange life. She'd won Love Live. She was friends with weird, vague, assholes who appeared to be involved with strange things above Nico's paygrade. She'd dated a prickly girl who believed in Santa. That night, however, Nico had meet a new level of unreality, as Mari Ohara stood in the hotel penthouse, selecting her outfit for the evening like she hadn't just asked Nico to go to a major film premiere with her.

"Are… are you sure you want me to come to a premiere, Mari?" Nico said, peering at Mari over her laptop. "I mean we've only been doing... this for a few months."

Had it really only been a few months?

After Nico and Mari had hooked up, they'd started a strange courtship which had consisted of going to clubs and seeing who could hook up with the most girls. (It was typically, at max, one girl per club. Most gay bars were filled with men, and the only women there seemed paralyzed like rabbits before a busy street. Nico tried - she really damn tried - but more often than not, she would at best flirt with a woman for twenty minutes, get a number, and never call/never be called. (Once, at an all-night cafe after clubbing, Mari had said something about "The L Word lying to her" when it came to women and nightclubs.)

And Nico found herself returning to Mari's bed more and more as the semester went on, cuddling as much as fucking, and somehow watching a subbed version of The L Word. Mari insisted the subbed version was better than the Japanese dub - you got all of the nuances of language and emotion in the sub.

Each night was endless - and the more Nico partied, the less Nico dreamed. No whirls of shades and tints and turmoil within her unconscious.

Mari looked at Nico with amber-bright eyes and smiled. "Well, YES, of course I want you to come. SO WHAT if it's been a few months? We are INTIMATE, are we not? This is a perfect date opportunity. I would never leave my GAL PAL home."

Nico was never really sure when Mari was being ironic or not with that GAL PAL thing. "W-well, naturally you would take your GAP PAL, it's… it's just… M-Mari… we're… we're talking Hollywood here… this is solid one-year moved-in-together levels of publicity and commitment here…"

"You won Love Love, did you not? You're an idol," Mari kissed her hand, leaving a glittering pink stain on pale skin, "You are my idol. You belong there, Nico. You don't need me to justify your presence at a grand event."

Speech eluded Nico in that moment, and it was all she could do to nod at her INTIMATE… GAL PAL. (They had yet to truly define the relationship, but of course helicopter rides struck Nico as a very new and exciting step on the relationship escalator.)

Mari led her to the terrace overlooking the rest of the hotel. It was a grand and shining hotel; the trees in the courtyard were always strung with lamps that shone off the waters of the tiered glowing fountains. Italy. Florence, Italy. This was a fantasy, Nico thought. There was no other way to explain how she got here, in the land of riches. The Ohara chain hotels made Maki's home look like a scholarship student dorm.

Standing there next to Mari, with the scent of roses from the garden coming in from the night wind, and the hills of Italy crowding in around them, Nico could hardly remember her previous life. Mari looked down at the lights as if a goddess from her temple. The warm glow caught on her soap-opera dress, giving her a radiant look. It was a truly awesome sight- a woman outlined in pure light and color. An angel. Then she moved and the spell was broken, wrapping her arms around Nico. "Idols deserve the BEST, do we not?"

Sometimes Nico forgot Mari had been in some other group. Some kind of... mermaid motif? Nico felt bad for not remembering. They were peers, of a sort. "You make a convincing argument."

If Nico's friends had been here, she would have said something about how Nico was the number one idol in the world, and only the best could satisfy her. But here- in the face of someone who had actually led such a glorious shining lifestyle, Nico could not help but falter. (She supposed, with a glint of self-awareness, that perhaps this is why she could not help but rag on Maki the way she did; something inside her always felt inadequate around the younger girl.)

"Imagine," Mari said, voice low and faraway, "us together- SHINING in the spotlight. All eyes on us."

"I can't wait for Tiger Beat to cover Japanese Paris Hilton and Nico Yazawa at a Disney movie premiere."

Mari pulled at Nico's pigtails gently, the way she knew Nico liked. "The world will tremble at our feet."

Mari travelled back and forth to Italy and the United States, supposedly on business, but mostly on pleasure. But she was lonely, Mari told Nico. It was a strange world to live in, being an heiress and ex-idol, with all of her friends getting respectable ex-idol jobs or going to college or getting unrespectable ex-idol jobs. And Nico was the first person Mari had connected with in a long time. Would Nico like to come along? Nico, having had all online classes and a willing subletter, could travel with Mari (as long as Mari covered everything, which Mari did without even the slightest notion of how much money she was spending.)

It was a gorgeous, lonely world, Nico thought. Full of wealth and beauty but also nights alone and transient feelings.

On nights they were in Japan, Nico would have strange dreams: Sand and salt. Light and water. Pain and submersion. Smoke billowed from the nostrils of dragons, from the painted mouths of women, from the stacks in the sky that spewed their toxic waste. She saw Another Nico. A slight woman who smoked out of an electronic cigarette, with cool red eyes turned away from the camera. Her hair was cut short, bobbed, in an edgy way Nico would never have considered for herself. She went under. Short hair spread out in the water like a sea urchin. A woman next to her, in the waves, being pulled down further, with bright glassy eyes-

Nico would wake up with her heart pounding, sweating all over the bed. She never knew what to make of those dreams, other than that she always felt better when she left the country. Maybe that's why Nico left college behind so willingly, ready to drop her half-hearted projects and networking for the first bit of real excitement. Because something at home stirred within Nico, asking her to look deeper than she wanted.

"Nico Nico Nii for me, Nico."

Nico gulped. Nico and Mari had been in bed together for an hour already and her brain felt like mush. Mari was on top of her again, hands pressing hers down onto the 1800 thread count sheets. The girl had strength, far more than Nico would have guessed, and Nico loved it. There was nothing fragile about Mari, never did she worry she was doing something wrong with her. Mari's power engulfed her as a crushing wave swallowing her whole, and she relished each moment under.

Mari kissed her neck, her throat with softness; her voice hard and commanding. "I want to hear your Nico Nico Nii, Nico. MOAN it for me," She lifted her hands from Nico's wrists, "Show me your DEEPEST parts. The DEEPEST Nico."

Nico missed the pressure on her wrists, moaning a little when it stopped. Mari was shaking her head. It was hard not to be aware of Mari; the way her legs were spread, the negligee that showed more than it hid, the gauzy material that accented the lace underneath. Everything about Mari was shimmering and refined- Nico was merely naked- her simple nightshirt and underwear had been removed long ago.

"D-deepest parts? Deepest Nico?"

"Your SOUL."

Nico thought, for an instant, of the woman she kept seeing in her dreams, with red eyes and shorn hair.

"Tsk. So sultry all of a sudden. So cryptic." Mari said, with a gentle reprimand. "Is that my Nico's SOUL? A mystery?"

Nico had no idea what her soul was. Which, she supposed, made it a mystery. But there was one thing Nico could always go back to, in a sing-song voice: "N-Nico nico nii?"

"NO, NO," Mari did the classic hand gesture, chest moving hypnotically under the see-through material, "Like this."

Trembling, Nico folded her middle and ring fingers into the true nico nico nii form. Like she was a cute little idol again. Her face filled with heat. She raised her arms. Left up, right down. "Nico," Left down, right up, "N-ico," Left up, right down, "Nii."

Mari purred.

The gas station was deserted except for Nico and Mari. Mari wore a lace white dress that clung to her curves, accentuated everything but somehow revealing nothing. Nico was in a velvet black dress. Nico tried to remember where they were going. They'd gone to the premier. Then the after party... She was still drunk from last night. Why did Nico drink so much? Her head was shrinking around her skull. Someday, it would occur to her that she was diminutive of figure and therefore could not hold as many toxins in her body as the next person, but today was not that day.

"ELECTRONIC SMOKE? WOW."

Mari pointed to the display case next to the register. A tiny neon sign with smoke billowing out of a cylinder hung over the case, along with tiny energy drink bottles and caffeine pills. In one plastic box was a revolving plate of donuts. Nico needed water. And food. Had they really gone to a premier last night? Nico Yazawa wondered, if in every single alternate universe, she was hung over. "…yes. Electric smoke."

Nico and Mari had stopped by a gas station on the way home from Mari's beach house - in the United States - Mari had flown most of the way in her personal helicopter, a fact that still had not sunk into Nico's poor sleep deprived brain. And in the gas station Nico encountered… it. The object had been a recurring motif in her uneasy dreams for the past month: A vape.

She remembered her dream self: a woman smoking. Tendrils of vapor filling up the cracks of night. Flashing red eyes and a sultry look. The object the woman held was small. Compact. Electric. Was she selling it? Was dream Nico some kind of influencer? Nico did not understand the dreamscapes she inhabited. Pastels and neon and strange rainbow gradients that seeped into the depths of the sky. So bright. So forbidding. Hostile beauty.

"It's STRAWBERRY! Shall we get it?" Mari cusped her wanderlusting hands around Nico's waist, fluorescent sparkles catching on her pearly nails.

"Um," What do you say to this? "Sure."

"YES!" More English. The blonde was squeezing her now. "We shall be SO COOL."

Nico watched their intimate reflections in the tea-and-gatorade fridge door. This was real. Despite everything, she was flesh and blood with her GAL PAL, a real woman. They held breath and blood and skin. There was no dream here, with drowning women and freezing water. There was nothing to hide from, here, at this gas station.

"Nico?"

"Ah, nothing. It's silly. Let's go, babe."